[xocyabencl]

This is so true. A friend on Medicaid needed some medical care which the state was legally obligated to provide him. He was told by his primary care physician that the care was not available at all in the system, full stop. I helped him request the care through official channels. I then helped him initiate the process of filing a formal complaint when his requests were ignored for months.

He got a date at a sort of administrative court. The people from the local Medicaid program tried to trick him into dropping the complaint by promising that they would provide care - but only if he dropped his complaint before the court date. They said it looked bad for them if anyone filed a complaint. But nobody in the system could fit him in for an appointment until after the court date, he was told.

A game of chicken ensued. When my friend told the administrators he would only drop his complaint after receiving care, an appointment before the court date mysteriously appeared.

I felt like I had to use all of the skills I developed from debugging systems and negotiating exploding offers just to get my friend what he was legally supposed to get automatically. It was quite clear to me that the Medicaid program was using this formal complaint system as a form of triage, to reduce costs by weeding out the people who can't work the system well enough to hold the program to its obligations.

[nwah1]

In addition, the price of insulin is sky high, despite being non-patented, because of exploitation of a different set of arcane government policies by pharma companies that roll out slight modifications of insulin that they claim are more effective, and subsequently get everyone to prescribe those despite only marginal benefits at best... while the previous generations quickly fall off the market, as soon as their patents expire.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-drug-companies-keep-insulin...

[aangjie]

Ugg... that looks like a ripe market for some Indian company to sell the older versions of insulin. (Of course, there will be legal hurdles and hoops to jump through, but it seems like it'll be bringing competition to the US companies better).

I for one, am tempted to just ignore the legal aspects and start a market on tor or something like that. sigh..