Scorpian stings are painful, hospital bills are much worse.

http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2012/0...-charges-woman-83000-to-treat-scorpion-sting/

So it's $40,000 per dose in the US but only $100 per dose in Mexico? I know hospitals mark up to a pretty extreme level but this is insane.

Mexicans make good stuff!

It's the pharma companies. They manufacture the drugs overseas (usually in China, sometimes in India), gouge U.S. customers, and sell the identical drugs in Mexico and Canada for a fraction of the U.S. price.

That $40,000/dose would be inflated from $10,500/dose when Anascorp was first released only a year ago.

Talk about price gouging!

And buy even better stuff!

Soy muy loco por el Cornballer!

Part of the reason it's cheaper in Mexico is because the demand is a lot higher in Mexico than it is in the US, because apparently scorpions stings are more common. 250,000 scorpion stings per year common. In the US, that number is only about 17,000 stings per year.

There's also a lot of price markup associated with getting the anti-venom in the US, to be sure. But really, the insurance company needs to be covering more of the costs. The only solution is to release a few thousand scorpions into this health insurance provider's corporate headquarters.

So...if she hadn't got the anti-venom, would she have lived? That is, if she knew ahead of time the bill would have been that high, would she have thought "what are the odds of me actually dying? People get bit all the time. There have to be other ways to treat a sting."

Sounds like we need some competition in the scorpion anti-venom market.

Chad pretty much answered my question. Did all the American scorpion victims pay 80K for treatment?

I heard an interview with a woman who'd gotten attacked by a rabid raccoon. She had a hell of a time getting the needed vaccine because at something like $1000 a dose, none of the people who're supposed to cover the cost wanted to do it. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, because there's a narrow window in which you can get the less painful shots, apparently. Total price gouging because it turns out that vets routinely have to take the same vaccine and its a mere pittance for them.

Wordforge should look at tapping into this up and coming market of anti-venoms.

Scorpion anti-venom might be covered better or completely by their health insurance providers. I would hope.

I agree with you completely, I was attempting to explain some of the price variation between the US anti-venom and the Meixcan anti-venom. The low demand is not entirely the reason, of course, but does contribute I'm sure. The health insurance provider should have covered a fuckton more of the costs, and the price shouldn't be artificially inflated by the pharmaceutical company.

Hmmm.....when you're talking HUGE bills like this, I think insurance companies by now would have found a loophole to not cover these treatments.

They probably have no choice. Such extreme cost, life saving procedures are usually mandated by state regs. It's a perfect example, by the way, of why we can't just leave it entirely in the hands of the market -- no insurers would cover it if not mandated.

Well, yeah, but medical patent law won't allow that. What we need is to finance medical research directly and through rewards rather than through patents that grant monopoly profits, or, at the very least, to change medical patents of this type so that they require patent holders to license their products for something like a 5% cut of revenue.

Meh. They don't care. The hospital is the one who has to eat the costs if the patient can't pay.

Eh, efforts to--shall we say?--manuver the profit out of producing new treatments are bound to make new treatments rarer.

If the problem here is a patent, then it's only a matter of time before the patent expires and the problem solves itself.

Wow, insurers wouldn't actually provide insurance if they weren't mandated to.

That's deep.

Of course they would provide insurance for predictable and or inexpensive procedures. Don't be a dimwhit, it doesn't match your IQ.

Insurers wouldn't insure specific things that are ridiculously expensive if not mandated. Why? Because covering anti-scorpion venom requires higher premiums. Higher premiums by an insurer who decides to cover it is a competitive disadvantage against those that don't. The state wants it covered, so to protect the insurers, it mandates coverage by all. Please tell me you do actually understand this rather basic element of insurance and its fatal flaw under a pure free market.

Please tell me you understand that these accumulation of "mandates" make health care much more expensive than it needs to be.

To put it another way, what's better for the VAST majority of people: a health plan with NO scorpion coverage they CAN afford, or one WITH that they can't?

And before I get some deflection, these mandates ABSOLUTELY do raise the cost of insurance. Coverage in California is twice as expensive as comparable coverage in Nevada, and the main reason is all the regulation California puts on insurers. We're forbidden to buy across state lines to get health insurance without the California "extras"...like the accupuncture and holistic medicine coverage I *must* buy even though I don't want it.

Yes, people DO get benefits from the regulations, but they also get the costs. And given the inability of many to afford health insurance, we should probably be more considered about the costs than the benefits.

I'll provide the placebo, *spits into a vial*


...What?

Bull. The drug is MADE in Mexico. The same drug that is sold in Mexico, so any effeciencies of scale would translate equally.

No this is simply what happens when you leave something with an extremely rare, but inelastic demand up to the market.

For Profit Healthcare FTW!

There is the problem with healthcare in this country. What we need to do is apply the laws concerning fraud to that industry like we would the others. If your car needed to be towed and the tow company charged 10,000 bucks you know you could beat that, but the hospitals do this shit all the time. We need to put some people in jail for this bullshit and it will stop.

One highly exceptional case to draw conclusions from FTW!

What do you think I just said?

And there's the rub, isn't it? Nobody would buy scorpion insurance as an optional rider. And yet 17,000 people require it each year. What's the solution? Let them die?

Again, pay attention to what I've written -- I already explained that they do just that.

I agree. We should find a way to make scorpion venom less expensive. And, we should find a way to cover such unpredictable but expensive conditions, because I'm not willing to go with "let them die." I'm no fan of Obamacare -- it is an example of a broken political process forcing us to make unfortunate compromises in the name of kind of getting to the end zone. I like that more people will be covered, I don't like that we are still paying for insurance through a bizarre mixture of private spending, employment benefits, and state assistance. I can think of a variety of different plans that might achieve the goal of universal coverage more efficiently. But I'm not a dictator, nor is anybody else. In this country, we get what's possible, which very often means less than ideal. Fundamentally, the problem is that hodgepodge of payers. Thousands of individual deals made with providers, where only the providers have access to all of the relevant data, guarantees that the buyer gets a raw deal.

I don't believe scorpion stings are generally fatal (actually, only 0.27%[!!!] according to a quick Google search). So the alternative isn't really "let them die" but "let them suffer."

But people are either free to buy the coverage they think they need or they're not. There's not really a middle ground. When you bought your car insurance, you probably chose the limits of liability you thought proper. What if someone came along and told you that, no, you have to have higher limits and pay the additional premium? Why should their judgment overrule yours where your insurance is concerned?

If you live in scorpion country--and a lot of people do if there are 17,000 cases a year--you might consider buying scorpion coverage. Spread over a million people, the cost isn't going to be much. If you don't live in scorpion country, then such coverage is useless to you. Since these things generally go on a statewide basis, a mandate probably means that a lot of people who have ZERO risk wind up paying for coverage they'll never need.

And, again, we're only talking about ONE mandate. Because if it was JUST scorpions, it probably wouldn't matter too much. But it isn't. States can have LOTS of mandates, forcing you to buy lots of coverage that you don't want and aren't likely to need.

Do it the way everything else gets cheaper, faster: put it in a competitive market.

Health insurance usually doesn't list every type of injury or illness you're covered for (how could it?)...the high-cost in this case has to do with "out-of-network" issues which should be resolveable.

I'm unhappy with it, too, but for completely different reasons.

If you want it to be transparent (and work like a market should), then you have the buyer buy directly from the supplier. Any kind of arrangement where X pays but Y benefits is going to be a mess, full of moral hazard and unconnected feedback loops.

But it's not transparent.