Competitive Bidding in a Sick Society
August 7, 2009
With simple competitive bidding in Part D, Medicare recipients will receive twice as much in drug benefits for the exact same money paid out now. If anything, prices for drugs would be even less than those in Canada and currently in the VA program. You can etch this in stone. It is not a vague estimate! It is simple and done in every civilized country except ours. The White House negotiations with Pharma represents either boldfaced duplicity to protect Medicare fraud or feigned stupidity! Any solution but competitive bidding is a vile and contemptuous attempt to promote racketeering in Washington.
With simple competitive bidding, durable goods and oxygen will cost one half to one third of current Medicare prices. Unlike drugs, the “Free Market” place has retail prices for these things which the Medicare Program is not permitted to use. The solution is simple: The people responsible for fraudulent prices in Medicare drug, durable goods and oxygen programs need to be eliminated and replaced with the “free market” advocates. These people can be fired, they can be brought to justice and punished, pardoned or any of a number of appropriate methods should be used to cut out the cancers that they are.
Laboratories also need to be involved in competitive bidding, but there are no true retail prices for bloodwork, because, insanely, prices for private insurance providers are mostly based on Medicare “fraudulent” prices.
Allen Finkelstein, D.O.