Interesting story. Glad that you got the treatment that you needed.
Personally, I believe that all medical providers should be required to post a simple, transparent price for every appointment and procedure in their front office and on a public website.
Even better, the should be required to post their prices to a public-facing API so patients anywhere in the country can price shop for any procedure or treatment on third-party websites. It is ridiculous how hard it is to find a true price in the medical sector, though I must admit it is getting easier.
Mandatory, transparent, and automated prices would do wonders for the American health care system.
Thanks for writing this, Richard! I build health economic models for pharma companies and I recently had the pleasure of running an analysis for a client who was second to market in a rare cardiac indication. Their drug is both cheaper and more effective than the other option on the market at the time of launch. Amazingly, we had to account for a third treatment entering the market within the time frame of our analysis (only five years.)
The disease was only regularly diagnosed from the early 2010s, so I see it as a stunning success to go from "newly understood disease" to "three treatment options" in a little over a decade.
It's disheartening to me that an industry that so regularly delivers miracles (Ozempic, anyone?) is met with so much hostility by the public...
I know about Skyrizi from the many, many direct-to-consumer commercials they run on various streaming services. Your story suggests that many doctors do need nudges from their patients with psoriasis asking about this drug they’ve seen on TV. The Trump administration is making noises about banning such ads.
The experience you described is very similar to the experience I had last year with a drug called XYWAV for Narcolepsy. It was a weird experience that felt off and suspicious from the start. The quoted price for the drug was astronomical, but there was a large team of people working to push it through my insurance. They assured me that my costs would be minimal. The pharmaceutical company gave me my first month for free while they worked on my insurance. In the end, the side effects were not worth the minimal benefit I got from the drug, so I stopped taking it after a couple of months.
I agree that the American Medical System is both amazing and clunky. There is VERY BIG money pushing Big Pharma to produce. But the easy drugs have been done, and the researchers are under intense pressure to push the envelope for drugs that will give high ROI.
XYWAV is a weird drug with complicated dosage requirements, lots of side effects, minimal benefit, based on shaky research with a huge team of people financially invested in getting patients to take it.
I question the ethics of the Mayo Clinic doctor who cold-called me, suggesting the drug after finding my condition in a medical records search. He was on the research team for XYWAV. He was professionally and financially connected to the success of a questionable drug.
This is a potentially dangerous situation, and I'm not sure the safeguards in place are strong enough.
Interesting story. Glad that you got the treatment that you needed.
Personally, I believe that all medical providers should be required to post a simple, transparent price for every appointment and procedure in their front office and on a public website.
Even better, the should be required to post their prices to a public-facing API so patients anywhere in the country can price shop for any procedure or treatment on third-party websites. It is ridiculous how hard it is to find a true price in the medical sector, though I must admit it is getting easier.
Mandatory, transparent, and automated prices would do wonders for the American health care system.
Thanks for writing this, Richard! I build health economic models for pharma companies and I recently had the pleasure of running an analysis for a client who was second to market in a rare cardiac indication. Their drug is both cheaper and more effective than the other option on the market at the time of launch. Amazingly, we had to account for a third treatment entering the market within the time frame of our analysis (only five years.)
The disease was only regularly diagnosed from the early 2010s, so I see it as a stunning success to go from "newly understood disease" to "three treatment options" in a little over a decade.
It's disheartening to me that an industry that so regularly delivers miracles (Ozempic, anyone?) is met with so much hostility by the public...
I know about Skyrizi from the many, many direct-to-consumer commercials they run on various streaming services. Your story suggests that many doctors do need nudges from their patients with psoriasis asking about this drug they’ve seen on TV. The Trump administration is making noises about banning such ads.
The experience you described is very similar to the experience I had last year with a drug called XYWAV for Narcolepsy. It was a weird experience that felt off and suspicious from the start. The quoted price for the drug was astronomical, but there was a large team of people working to push it through my insurance. They assured me that my costs would be minimal. The pharmaceutical company gave me my first month for free while they worked on my insurance. In the end, the side effects were not worth the minimal benefit I got from the drug, so I stopped taking it after a couple of months.
I agree that the American Medical System is both amazing and clunky. There is VERY BIG money pushing Big Pharma to produce. But the easy drugs have been done, and the researchers are under intense pressure to push the envelope for drugs that will give high ROI.
XYWAV is a weird drug with complicated dosage requirements, lots of side effects, minimal benefit, based on shaky research with a huge team of people financially invested in getting patients to take it.
I question the ethics of the Mayo Clinic doctor who cold-called me, suggesting the drug after finding my condition in a medical records search. He was on the research team for XYWAV. He was professionally and financially connected to the success of a questionable drug.
This is a potentially dangerous situation, and I'm not sure the safeguards in place are strong enough.