If it was billed to insurance, they would pass those costs over to the people paying the premiums.
Some insurance policies are self-funded: Meaning they have plans, but the insurance company is really just the administrator. The actual costs are paid by the company employing the people buying the insurance. They can both pass the costs onto the employees paying health insurance premiums plus add in that cost to the goods they sell.
A great deal of insurance plans have a co-payment for drugs. If you had to pay 20% of the cost of this drug, that is still quite an increase for the patient.
Not everyone needing these drugs has insurance. Luckily, some charities exist to try to pay the bills for these folks and sometimes there are other discounts available for the uninsured.
Some people are on government insurance plans, both in the US and in places with state health care. In these cases, the costs are passed onto tax payers.
Sorry, but pretty much everyone pays for this sort of thing.
No, in the United States they're generally passed on to the insured's employer. There are several negative aspects of that, but the big one is that the patient is less likely to complain about being overcharged if someone else is paying for it.
The whole idea of employer-paid insurance in the U.S. is an artifact of some tax law jiggery pokery back in (if I'm remembering right) the Depression/WWII era. Before that people paid for their own health insurance.
Perhaps that's how the mythical homo economicus would see it, but that's not how real people see it.
See also: the way that most people view a tax refund as "free money" that the government is "giving" them, rather than them having given the government an interest-free loan of that money (which is the actual case).
When they get a (partial) refund of the taxes withheld, they're happy, rather than being disappointed that they've had too much withheld (as homo economicus would).
If, instead, no taxes were withheld and they were forced to come up with the (non-refunded) portion in a lump sum payment once a year they'd be outraged.
Human psychology and math don't really overlap that much.
In one sense, yes, the money the employer pays would be available for wages, but the problem is that any savings would come out of a pool of potential wages for all employees. There is no direct incentive for an individual employee to save money on health care, because those savings will make zero impact on his paycheck.
One way of trying to get around this is, of course, the "copay". If the employee saves money, he does, in most cases, have a somewhat smaller copay. But the incentive isn't nearly as high as it would be if all the savings accrued directly to the employee.
If it was billed to insurance, they would pass those costs over to the people paying the premiums.
Some insurance policies are self-funded: Meaning they have plans, but the insurance company is really just the administrator. The actual costs are paid by the company employing the people buying the insurance. They can both pass the costs onto the employees paying health insurance premiums plus add in that cost to the goods they sell.
A great deal of insurance plans have a co-payment for drugs. If you had to pay 20% of the cost of this drug, that is still quite an increase for the patient.
Not everyone needing these drugs has insurance. Luckily, some charities exist to try to pay the bills for these folks and sometimes there are other discounts available for the uninsured.
Some people are on government insurance plans, both in the US and in places with state health care. In these cases, the costs are passed onto tax payers.
Sorry, but pretty much everyone pays for this sort of thing.