Mercy president and CEO Lynn Britton made $1,930,000, and an executive vice president, Myra Aubuchon, was paid $3.7 million, according to the Mercy filing. In all, seven Mercy Health executives were paid more than $1 million each.
“Doctors have no incentive to buy one kind of hip or other implantable device as a group,” explains Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist and a vice provost of the University of Pennsylvania who was a key White House adviser when Obamacare was created. “Even in the most innocent of circumstances, it kills the chance for market efficiencies.”
Mercy president and CEO Lynn Britton made $1,930,000, and an executive vice president, Myra Aubuchon, was paid $3.7 million, according to the Mercy filing. In all, seven Mercy Health executives were paid more than $1 million each.Justme-You are sick. You take any post the is even remotely political and make it an insane diatribe against Obama. I am serious about this...You need psychiatric help. Obama is the only thing on your mind. If I ran the Secret Service I would have you under constant watch and would not let you within 500 miles of the President.
The circumstances are not always innocent. In 2008, Gregory Demske, an assistant inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, told a Senate committee that “physicians routinely receive substantial compensation from medical-device companies through stock options, royalty agreements, consulting agreements, research grants and fellowships.”
The assistant inspector general then revealed startling numbers about the extent of those payments: “We found that during the years 2002 through 2006, four manufacturers, which controlled almost 75% of the hip- and knee-replacement market, paid physician consultants over $800 million under the terms of roughly 6,500 consulting agreements.”
Aware of the huge profits being accumulated by devicemakers, Obama Administration officials decided to recapture some of the money by imposing a 2.39% federal excise tax on the sales of these devices as well as other medical technology such as CT-scan equipment. The rationale was that getting back some of these generous profits was a fair way to cover some of the cost of the subsidized, broader insurance coverage provided by Obamacare — insurance that in some cases will pay for more of the devices. The industry has since geared up in Washington and is pushing legislation that would repeal the tax.
Medtronic spokeswoman Donna Marquad says that for competitive reasons, her company will not discuss sales figures or the profit on Steve H.’s neurostimulator. But Medtronic’s October 2012 quarterly SEC filing reported that its spine “products and therapies,” which presumably include Steve H.’s device, “continue to gain broad surgeon acceptance” and that its cost to make all of its products was 24.9% of what it sells them for.
That’s an unusually high gross profit margin — 75.1% — for a company that manufactures real physical products. Apple also produces high-end, high-tech products, and its gross margin is 40%. If the neurostimulator enjoys that company-wide profit margin, it would mean that if Medtronic was paid $19,000 by Mercy Hospital, Medtronic’s cost was about $4,500 and it made a gross profit of about $14,500 before expenses for sales, overhead and management — including CEO Omar Ishrak’s compensation, which was $25 million for the 2012 fiscal year.
A spokesman at Genentech for the Biogen Idec–Genentech partnership would not say what the drug cost the companies to make, but according to its latest annual report, Biogen Idec’s cost of sales — the incremental expense of producing and shipping each of its products compared with what it sells them for — was only 10%. That’s lower than the incremental cost of sales for most software companies, and the software companies usually don’t produce anything physical or have to pay to ship anything.
“When you’re getting trained as a doctor,” says a physician who was involved in framing health care policy early in the Obama Administration, “you’re taught to order what’s called ‘morning labs.’ Every day you have a variety of blood tests and other tests done, not because it’s necessary but because it gives you something to talk about with the others when you go on rounds. It’s like your version of a news hook … I bet 60% of the labs are not necessary.”
The country’s largest lab tester is Quest Diagnostics, which reported revenues in 2012 of $7.4 billion. Quest’s operating income in 2012 was $1.2 billion, about 16.2% of sales.
Grifols spokesman Christopher Healey would not discuss what it cost Grifols to produce and ship Alan A.’s dose, but he did say that the company’s average cost to produce its bioscience products, Flebogamma included, was approximately 55% of what it sells them for. However, a doctor familiar with the economics of cancer-care drugs said that plasma products typically have some of the industry’s higher profit margins. He estimated that the Flebogamma dose for Alan A. — which Sloan-Kettering bought from Grifols for $1,400 or $1,500 and sold to Medicare for $2,135 — “can’t cost them more than $200 or $300 to collect, process, test and ship.”
More than $280 billion will be spent this year on prescription drugs in the U.S. If we paid what other countries did for the same products, we would save about $94 billion a year. The pharmaceutical industry’s common explanation for the price difference is that U.S. profits subsidize the research and development of trailblazing drugs that are developed in the U.S. and then marketed around the world. Apart from the question of whether a country with a health-care-spending crisis should subsidize the rest of the developed world — not to mention the question of who signed Americans up for that mission — there’s the fact that the companies’ math doesn’t add up.
Justme-You are sick. You take any post the is even remotely political and make it an insane diatribe against Obama...I suspect that a lot of this got it's impetuous in the Bush administration.Shame on me for bringing up Obama and turning this political, we all know it's Bush's fault :lol: :lol: :lol:
Our laws do more than prevent the government from restraining prices for drugs the way other countries do. Federal law also restricts the biggest single buyer — Medicare — from even trying to negotiate drug prices. As a perpetual gift to the pharmaceutical companies (and an acceptance of their argument that completely unrestrained prices and profit are necessary to fund the risk taking of research and development), Congress has continually prohibited the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of the Department of Health and Human Services from negotiating prices with drugmakers. Instead, Medicare simply has to determine that average sales price and add 6% to it.
Similarly, when Congress passed Part D of Medicare in 2003, giving seniors coverage for prescription drugs, Congress prohibited Medicare from negotiating.
Nor can Medicare get involved in deciding that a drug may be a waste of money. In medical circles, this is known as the comparative-effectiveness debate, which nearly derailed the entire Obamacare effort in 2009.
Sutter Health, a dominant nonprofit Northern California chain whose CEO made $5,241,305 in 2011.Reducing drugmakers’ prices to what they get in other developed countries would save over $90 billion a year. It could save Medicare — meaning the taxpayers — more than $25 billion a year, or $250 billion over 10 years. Depending on whether that $250 billion is compared with the Republican or Democratic deficit-cutting proposals, that’s a third or a half of the Medicare cuts now being talked about.
Finally, we should embarrass Democrats into stopping their fight against medical-malpractice reform and instead provide safe-harbor defenses for doctors so they don’t have to order a CT scan whenever, as one hospital administrator put it, someone in the emergency room says the word head. Trial lawyers who make their bread and butter from civil suits have been the Democrats’ biggest financial backer for decades. Republicans are right when they argue that tort reform is overdue. Eliminating the rationale or excuse for all the extra doctor exams, lab tests and use of CT scans and MRIs could cut tens of billions of dollars a year while drastically cutting what hospitals and doctors spend on malpractice insurance and pass along to patients.
When you follow the money, you see the choices we’ve made, knowingly or unknowingly.
Over the past few decades, we’ve enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we’ve squeezed the doctors who don’t own their own clinics, don’t work as drug or device consultants or don’t otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we’ve squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills.
We’ve created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract.
And we’ve allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says is the obvious and only issue: “All the prices are too damn high.”
I am sure that you haven't read the articleThere are thousands of articles on the reasons health care costs are climbing so fast, most of them give different reasons. To point out the article you posted is the "holy grail" doesn't make it so. I pointed out that if you're upset with the costs now, just wait until Obamacare fully kicks in...that's providing factual information you can take to the bank.
BilboBagend wrote:Follow the money. Monopoly/Oligopoly pricing power rather than free market competition or regulation of monopolies.Let's do that, follow the Money - Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Democrat Friends and Donors, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Democrat fun raisers, Foreign Companies, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government, Government...
BilboBagend wrote:Hey, look, more outright delusional lies from liar leroy.Hey, look, more denial of the Obama Administrations own information on Health Care costs - how usual from Dildo.
How usual.
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