Letter: Insurance, industry does nothing to keep med costs down

Published 1:30 am Monday, August 8, 2016

Health insurance

Being priced out of medication

I’m guessing that there are a lot of you out there who are as fed up as I am with our insurance programs. To start with, all of our medications are priced sky-high, with no relief in sight. They say it’s so costly to produce these meds. Well, once the research is over, and they are, in fact, manufacturing them, I wonder how, if a pill costs pennies to make, how can they charge as much as hundreds per pill?! Not only that, if they want to raise the price, even without reason, they can! It seem to me that the pharmaceutical companies come first, and the heck with us. They are worth billions, but I guess it’s not enough.

Some of you might be familiar with the term “the doughnut hole.” This is a period we reach when we haven’t spent enough money on our prescriptions, so they jack up the prices. Then they followed that up with another one called “the coverage gap” — now what does that one mean?

In plain English, what they are telling us is, we haven’t spent as much money as they would like, so they get back by raising the price of our prescriptions. And there is nothing we can do about it.

Our representatives surely are aware of this ripoff, so why don’t they try for us? Are they afraid they might offend someone?

Harry Pringle

Marysville