One Family’s Obamacare Nightmare
One of this blog’s consistent themes is that Obamacare incentivizes insurers to attract the healthy and shun the sick. Pattie Curran is a North Carolina mother of two children born with a rare bone-marrow dysfunction. She reported her experience in the Washington Times:
The co-pay for a medication that protects my youngest son’s kidneys from damage had been $131 for a three-month supply for five to six years before the law passed. In 2011, the medication suddenly more than doubled. We watched in horror as it skyrocketed to $532 by the middle of 2013, while at the same time trying to get a medical-necessity exception. Obamacare not only made everything less affordable, it created more work for families and providers. We have witnessed a corresponding decrease in quality of care because of the extra administrative demands placed on physicians and their staff.
During the past month, some of our sons’ most important medications have been discontinued from coverage altogether.
This is a tragic, but not surprising outcome of a system that gives politicians the power to allocate medical resources. They will allocate them such that the majority of healthy people get “free” “preventive” care, while the truly sick pay the price.
John, it is not clear in this piece whether the drug company quadrupled the price of the drug or whether the insurer imposed a higher deductible.
Both of these unhappy events could have happened, and did, before Obamacare. It could well be that these thing are happening more often with the ACA. (I suspect that to be the case.)
But your piece does not prove this.
As for “extra administrative demand on staff,” again we do not know if the ACA is the cause. The hospital might have been losing a lot o money,
Thank you. There is evidence that the prices of specialty drugs has been rising dramatically, and that is not reflected in this article. Nevertheless, I am not sure how the behavior of the insurer described above gets to that challenge.
john, i agree with you