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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1995

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Hallam K.
Medicare Chief Says Drug Premium Will Average $32.20
Bloomberg 2005 Aug 9


Full text:

Medicare Chief Says Drug Premium Will Average $32.20 (Update1)
2005-08-09 14:54 (New York)

By Kristen Hallam Aug. 9 (Bloomberg) — Medicare chief Mark McClellan said that
monthly premiums for drug coverage will average $32.20, less than
the government had estimated in March, because of lower
prescription costs. McClellan gave the new estimate in a briefing today with
reporters in Washington. Medicare trustees, in their annual report
in March, estimated the premium would be $37.37. The drug benefit
will take effect Jan. 1 and will be operated by private
contractors including Aetna Inc. and UnitedHealth Group Inc. The lower-than-expected premiums are the result of insurance
companies’ ``effective’‘ negotiations with drug manufacturers and
efforts to promote the use of cheaper generic medicines, McClellan
said. It’s also possible that plans could charge no premium to
Medicare patients, McClellan said. ``Lower premiums should make the benefit more attractive to
more people,’‘ McClellan said at the briefing. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is still
negotiating with insurance companies and hasn’t yet approved any
bids for the drug-benefit business, McClellan said. As many as 30 million of Medicare’s 42 million elderly and
disabled enrollees will sign up for the drug coverage next year,
according to government estimates.

—Editor: Greene

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909