Drugs, Money, and Secret Handshakes
Status: Dropped (end of Chapter 3)
Rating: 1/5
This book is about prescription drug pricing. It includes egregious factual errors. Below are two examples.
From Chapter 2, page 10:
Even with Medicare, 12 percent of beneficiaries are neither enrolled in prescription drug coverage nor covered by another prescription plan such as veteran’s benefits. Thus cash-paying consumers who lack sufficient drug prices year after year, rebates have less meaning in real dollar terms. A 10 percent rebate on a price that has risen 20 percent in recent years is not much of a bargain. As a result, the total out-of-pocket amount that US consumers are spending on medication continues to rise sharply.
The bolded text is unambiguously false. In the United States, total out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs did not increase at all in the decade preceding the book’s publication (see graph below).
From Chapter 3, page 34:
Medicare certainly does have considerable ability to influence the course of the industry. Nevertheless, the system is not quite so simple. Medicare is a federal program, administered by the states. The government enters into contracts with private health insurers to operate Medicare plans, and Medicare patients choose from among those private plans to decide where to enroll.
Medicare is not administered by the states. It is administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which is a federal agency.