Health Insurance Companies are reportedly introducing a new and higher co-payment into their plans. Policyholders who require expensive drugs that have no available generic will be paying a high percentage of the drugs' cost under these plans. There will no longer be a flat fee co-pay for these particular drugs, such as $50.00, after which the Health Insurance Companies will pay the rest of their cost.
The drugs in question are the kind that are prescribed as the only known tools to combat cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, hemophilia, and hepatitis C it is reported in Gina Kolata, "Co-Payments Go Way Up For Drugs With High Costs/Insurers Shift Burden/Fees For Most Expensive Class of Pills Soar Tenfold or More" p. A1, col. 6 (New York Times Nat'l Ed., Monday, April 14, 2008).
For drugs targeted by this new co-pay percentage, there are no generics. The alternative to these drugs is the condition they are prescribed to treat. Without treatment, the conditions treated by these drugs cause great pain and in many instances, a painful death.
It is very naive, and potentially dangerous, to equate capitalism with greed. Some Health Insurance Company executives seem to have done that. At the same time as Health Insurance Companies target these particular no-alternative drugs with these tailored new co-payment plans, thereby adding enormous sums of money in profit obtained from those people who come up with the money to pay the co-pays for even a little while, their officers are provided increasing sums of money in outsized bonuses and other pay. This situation cannot last. Patients will not long submit to such plans. Suffering people will not for long voluntarily pay such a high price, a price imposed once by fate, and imposed a second time by greed.
One of the enduring lessons of life is that greed does not impose its own limits.
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