Elisabeth Rosenthal

“ECONOMIC RULES OF THE DYSFUNCTIONAL MEDICAL MARKET More treatment is always better. Default to the most expensive option. A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure. Amenities and marketing matter more than good care. As technologies age, prices can rise rather than fall. There is no free choice. Patients are stuck. And they’re stuck buying American. More competitors vying for business doesn’t mean better prices; it can drive prices up, not down. Economies of scale don’t translate to lower prices. With their market power, big providers can simply demand more. There is no such thing as a fixed price for a procedure or test. And the uninsured pay the highest prices of all. There are no standards for billing. There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything. Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.”
― Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back

“To get products approved, firms had to create applications to prove that medicines were ‘”safe and effective”, meaning more effective than doing nothing at all. That standard was never refined to include the more modern question: Is the product more effective than the dozens of other treatments for a particular conditions that are already on the market? Equally important, the FDA yardstick for approval did not include any consideration of price of cost-effectiveness – a metric that virtually all other countries now use as they consider admitting new drugs to their formula.”
― Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back