It’s reasonable to expect people to exhaust lower cost alternatives, that are reasonably expected to work, before stepping up costs.
This also happens if the employer switches insurance.
So no it isn’t as innocent not as simple as saving costs for generics. This makes sense for the first time the patient seeks treatment. This doesn’t make sense if the patient already has a treatment plan that works and the insurance company decides they want to do the whole pony show again, fucking in peoples life for months.
The problem is, you won't be able to hammer down the health of the patient to the lowest cost option, only the most effective.
A [relatively] well known exception is anticonvulsants. My younger brother paid for that with his life. I hope the FDA figures out how to properly evaluate generic equivalence.
They shouldn’t have, though. Injections (what I’m on now) work better. They’re easier to maintain the correct dose, you don’t have to worry about getting it on your partner/kids, you only take it once every week or two…and it’s maybe $20 a month.
That’s not just a few dollars saved. There are probably hundreds of thousands of men out there that take it. I see there’s a generic gel now but it still costs anywhere from $60-$150 a month.
Too bad it’s $1,000 a month. We’re all paying that so people can avoid sticking themselves with a needle.
We don’t spend 100x on a drug because a doctor “has a feeling”.
The insurance requirements are typically quite limited for 1st line failures. Doctor just needs to prescribe then 2 weeks later attest that it didn’t work.
Seems reasonable to save the healthcare system thousands of dollars when tens of dollars would do?
Maybe you're talking about different medicines that people are using (like different insulins), the generics use the same formula as the original.
