The Prescription Drug Playbook (From An Arm And A Leg)
Discover a few of the schemes US Healthcare uses to screw patients, and some great ways to fight back.
Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It’s summer break over here at Organized Money, but don’t worry, we have a great story for you from our friends over at An Arm And A Leg: A show about why healthcare costs so damn much, and what we can do about it. Last year they did a series called The Prescription Drug Playbook, documenting all the ways we get screwed in the marketplace, and how we, individually, can make the best of an unfair situation. You’ll meet a dad on a mission to get his daughter’s epilepsy medication at a fair price, a pharmaceutical tech with a brilliant price hack, and even a Medicare coach: someone whose job is to help save seniors millions on their medication.
Originally presented as a series of episodes, here they’ve compiled everything into a one-stop handbook for navigating the weird world of prescription drugs. You can check out their newsletter, First Aid Kit, to go even deeper, and subscribe to the An Arm And A Leg Feed for more.
Listen via Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We also provide transcripts and video for every episode. Here is last week’s episode.
Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.
For-profit health care is EXTORTION.
What a disappointing podcast! As the father of a young woman who lives with cystic fibrosis -- annual pharmacy bill = an outrageous and unsustainable $400k per year -- I loved the feisty dad energy of Bob, the guy who went to bat for his daughter with epilepsy over the cost of her drugs. But an episode that does nothing more than advise patients and families about "practical lessons" avoids the elephant in the living room, which is the unconscionably high prices that Pharma firms get away with charging. This is monopoly power at its worst and I look to Organized Money for better insights than just telling dads like me not to lose their cool when on the phone with insurance providers. (Side note: I apologize to no one for losing my cool during such conversations; at some point to do otherwise is to shed one's humanity.) Overall, the subtext of this episode is that in the eternal struggle between Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance, it's the insurance plans that are evil. In reality, the story of prescription drug pricing and prescription drug access is an eternal tale of patients getting caught in the cross-fire between profit-maximizing payors and profit-maximizing payees. Please skip the anecdotes about the chairs on the Lido Deck and do an episode with Merith Basey of Patients for Affordable Drugs.