A Moving Experience: Italy vs. the US in the healthcare shell game
A shell game always involves deception or fraud. You’ll find plenty of online videos to show you the tricks in a street game with shells and peas. But what about the game with bigger stakes — the health of a person . . . or a country? Let’s look at the “guess what I cost” game in the US and compare it with Italy.
1. Keep your eye on the shell, er, pill.
How can one pill, one boring Tier One (Medicarespeak for cheap and easy to produce) pill vacillate so much in price? I needed a refill for such a pill, so ubiquitous that 23 million Americans take it, and as accessible as aspirin, right?
Wrong. I asked the doctor to send the prescription to a new pharmacy because the posted price of various prescription drugs in that pharmacy seemed very competitive, and I am always happy to thwart the profit margins of Big Pharma.
But when I came to pick up this particular item (let’s call it T), I encountered a bait-and-switch. The posted price was $10, which I assumed was for a 90-day supply of T, since that is what my prescription called for. “Sorry,” said the pharmacist. “That is our price for a 30-day supply.”
It was useless to recall that I had been paying € 2 in Italy for a month’s supply. Such prices belonged to rational, civilized health…
