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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (4613)	2/19/2008 7:17:36 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

I can believe that doctors would remember having been egalitarian more often than they actually were. I can also believe that patients who are in the doctors' offices are more likely to receive their free medications than those who have limited exposure to medical professionals. I know how my doctors use them. They give you a couple of weeks worth to see how you tolerate them. If the pills work, then they write a prescription. If not, they pull something different out of their stash. I also get samples sometimes because I use a mail order pharmacy so the sample keeps me until the prescription arrives. It never occurred to me that there might be another purpose--to support those who couldn't afford the pills. They work so well the way my doctors and I use them that it seems they must have been designed for that purpose.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (4613)	2/19/2008 11:06:43 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Even if many go to the insured and/or wealthy that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot left for poor and/or uninsured people. I only have anecdotal evidence but I know people with low income who relied on samples. $37,000+ for a family of four, or even for a single person, isn't vaguely wealthy, so the data doesn't support the idea that they are going to the wealthy, just that a lot of them go to people who aren't poor. And even the samples that really do go to the wealthy or people with solid insurance, that doesn't mean the samples are some sort of waste, which can reasonably be categorized as useless marketing costs (not that I think even conventional marketing is useless.) Instead of counting them as marketing costs you could consider them a discount on the average selling price. Also if you are going to count them as a real cost, it probably should be the cost of production and distribution, not the full retail price.