While we play armchair prognosticator on a merger, we tend to ignore the nuts and bolts of our health problems that are not simply the fault of Trump and the Republicans. Note the following from the F.D.A. stating it does not have mandatory recall authority over a potentially deadly drug. How many of us comment or contact our Congressmen about such issues? How many articles does the Times publish on such issues? What does the departure of investigative journalists such as Gretchen Morgenson indicate?
https://www.fda.gov/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/SafetyAlertsAdvisor...
December 4, 2017
"The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recommended that Primus Pharmaceuticals, Scottsdale, Arizona, voluntarily recall Limbrel, a capsule marketed to “manage the metabolic processes associated with osteoarthritis.” The company has not yet acted to remove the product from the market. Although the product is marketed as a medical food, the preliminary determination of the FDA investigation is that Limbrel is an unapproved new drug. The agency does not have mandatory recall authority over drug products.
The FDA reminds consumers not to use Limbrel because of the risk of drug-induced liver injury, and a lung condition called hypersensitivity pneumonitis. Consumers taking this product should stop immediately and contact their health care provider. Health care providers who are aware that their patients are taking Limbrel should advise them to stop using it."
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Great. Aetna will save so much money when they divert people away from their doctors and just drop dead. Much cheaper that way.
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Whenever I hear, "This will be good for consumers," I hide under the bed.
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Sure this will be a boon for the consumer...and I have a bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona for sale. Universal health care.
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NYT: Here's an idea for a piece of investigative journalism, at which you excel. Give a systematic look at approved mergers with pre-merger promises and post-merger keeping/breaking those promises. Then look at proposed mergers which did not come to be and see if the consumer is better or worse off in that field. I'm sure readers and journalists will improve this idea as it is in the brainstorming stage.
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This isn't about providing health care, it's about rationing and denying it.
Woe be the clinician who refuses to push the CVS product line in response to his/her patient's actual need.
Remember how WalMart closed down Main Street... Apparently not. But CVS and Aetna do.
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The United States, according to The Commonwealth Fund, currently has the most expensive health care and ranks last in quality and access compared to 11 countries that have single payer healthcare. Will the merger of 2 behemoth for-profit companies reverse this embarrassment is highly unlikely. Healthcare decisions need to be made by physicians CARING for their patients, not insurance companies and pharmacies who only care about their profits. We need to remove the profit motive from care, remove fee-for service and reward our physicians for quality, not quantity of care. This can only be achieved with single-payer Medicare for all. No insurance company can compete with the cost-effectiveness of Medicare.
When will our electorate wake up and realize that our politicians are in the pockets of corporations.
The first US President to recommend single-payer was Teddy Roosevelt (a Republican, believe it or not). Let's elect people like TR to represent us and get rid of the corruption in Washington DC that is leading our country into moral and fiscal bankruptcy.
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Insurance and pharmaceuticals, could anything be scarier?!? I am a retired federal employee who's health insurance company is underwritten by Aetna. We've just been told that in 2018 we can only use Express Scripts (i have nightmares about my dealings with them already) and CVS. As my choices get less and less, my power of choice diminishes accordingly. This kind of merger always results in gains to the big business and losses for the consumer.
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Are they still going to sell you cigarettes and 2-liter bottles of soda, and then provide health coverage resulting from use of said products?
My concern about this merger is that myself and many other consumers who have Aetna which is a commerical ins. and gets their biologic-medication currently thru Aetna Speciality RX which costs a lot for each dose but we get monetary assistance from the Drug Company who makes the Biologic drug because Aetna is a commerical Ins. If you are on Medicare Part D you can't get any help.
I don't see a Drug Company giving monetary assistance to another Drug Company. This means I will no longer be able to take this medication without the monetary help and I will end up in a wheel chair because of my sever arthritis which is in my hands and feet. There are many of us out there who should be really concerned about this merger and what will happen to our monetary assistance????????????
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A disaster in the making.
Since big business usurped control of medical care from the physicians who ran it like a small business, the quality of care has gone down while the cost has skyrocketed. Patients are paying more and getting less.
Furthermore, PBM's like CVS are directly responsible for the high cost of medications. Having them in control of a major insurance company is like allowing the fox into the hen house.
But hey.......there seems to be an epidemic of bad ideas regarding health care, what another one the enriches the pockets of big business at the expense of the middle class..
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This is not about improving your healthcare, but a corporate take-over of your health.
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I heard about the drugstore chain's bid for Aetna on the *CVS Evening News*.
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This merger will be a disaster for the consumers/patients if allowed to go through. CVS does not care about its patients. I have heard this story many times before and unfortunately experienced it first hand when my prescribed refill was denied by CVS and denied even after the doctor called them. If the mergers goes through, even more patients will be negatively affected by the money driven CVS type decisions rather than medical decisions to care for the patients.
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I am still waiting to see one merger that really helped the consumer. All that will happen here will be that both companies get a stronger lock on the market that allows them to increase prices. So CVS is willing to pay a significant premium for an insurance company that can’t afford to cut insurance premiums. No wonder premiums are so high. CVS CEO made more than $18 million, Aetna CEO more than $40 million with a potential payout of more than $80 million. Sounds like veryone will make money except the consumer.
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Here's why this is a really bad idea. Currently, Aetna requires its Medicare Advantage members to fill scripts at Walmart. Under this plan, you can immediately assume this would change to CVS. So what? So a lot. I had been filling my scripts at CVS for many years. At the time, I took five generic drugs—no brand names. The cost to five these five rose to over $400/month. So I started shopping them around. Kroger was less than half. Target was even lower. Walmart came in at $19/month for all five.
When I complained to CVS in RI, it hemmed and hawed and said it must be a glitch in its computer system (it kept switching me to its own PBM instead of the one I was supposed to have). I gave it another shot. Same thing. So yes, I switched my scripts to Walmart and didn't look back.
So anyone with Aetna Medicare Advantage can immediately expect the cost of scripts to rise precipitously. I speak from experience (but I learned I'm not the only one). CVS claims it doesn't set copay costs. Apparently, it finds a sneaky way to do just that. I switch to Medicare next year. I won't be going with Aetna for Medicare Advantage. No way. I simply don't trust CVS.
(BTW, CVS ultimately admitted what it had done to me through its computer system. Did it fix the problem? No. You've been warned. I dare CVS to respond, though it hates getting caught doing something this terribly wrong.)
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Aetna has for a while been attempting to address what everybody sees as a problem in US healthcare; a paucity of low cost highly effective primary care and an overemphasis on expensive, low return, but prestigious and lucrative specialty care, the epitome of the ironic situation whereby practitioners get paid less the healthier people are.
The benefits of more primary care include better health for the population as well as a caretaker role for reducing expensive and damaging behavior like using emergency rooms for care, shopping around for opioid prescriptions, bad drug interactions from prescriptions by different doctors, etc. This oversight has (to universal disparagement, more than they probably deserve) by default now fallen to insurers, who have taken over the role of medical management because they have the most complete record of the patient's care, since they pay the bills.
The last time something like this was tried was the HMO movement of the early 70s, which started as nonprofit effective care for the poor but quickly got converted to a mechanism whereby for-profit companies could pinch pennies.
The golden vision is that CVS' in-store care centers will be more convenient to the public for things like vaccinations and routine cases, but also provide the front end for the medical management system, seamless and painless compared to the current setup which often pits doctor versus insurer. If successful, it would likely benefit in both better health and lower costs.
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My employee health plan requires that I use both providers. CVS overcharges for the same drugs relative to other pharmacy systems, and Aetna appears to deny claims or treatment as a standard business practice; requiring me to go through a lengthy appeal process to get needed care.
These two businesses are an ideal couple, and God help the people that are covered by them.
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I hope the CVS and Aetna execs don't hurt their shoulders from patting themselves on the back.
I trust NEITHER Aetna nor CVS; I do not believe either company has MY best interests at heart.
I've dealt with Aetna for years, and I've found them to be one of the most obstructive and unhelpful companies imaginable. Lost claims, denied claims, misinformation - basically every kind of administrative roadblock has been put up to keep me from care I needed. Why would this merger change that? It isn't going to change Aetna's entrenched corporate culture.
And CVS has a reputation for being "big brother" as a pharmacy - I have not dealt with them so far, but will be forced to under my Medicare coverage in 2018.
Mergers like this are NOT done to benefit the patients. They're NEVER done to benefit the patients; they're done to benefit the corporate bottom line. CVS and Aetna can make all the claims they want, but I simply don't trust them.
And as for saving ME any money, I don't believe that for one minute! If this merger goes through, I fully expect it's going to cost me more TIME and more MONEY to get what I need - b/c I'll be subject to the whims of an even bigger and more uncaring conglomerate than I am now.
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Oh Goodie - Aetna, a health care insurer with a well deserved reputation for being difficult to do business with gets married to CVS - who also owns Caremark - a high cost Pharmacy Benefits Manager who can't manage its way out of a wet paper bag. I can hardly wait.
Perhaps the Clown in Chief will decide to stop this merger and leave AT&T and Time-Warner alone.
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Aetna has been using Caremark as their pharmacy benefits manager for a few years now, at least partially due to less than stellar performance by their previous in-house and outsourced organizations.
My initial observations were not positive; not only was Caremark no improvement over their predecessors, but it was evident that Aetna was merely one more flea on giant CVS-Caremark's back, and attention to Aetna's workers' requirements for their sincere efforts to help members was unavoidably filtered through numerous impenetrable layers of competing corporate bureaucracies, squabbles over contracted performance levels, incompatible human and data systems, and all the other predictable problems in such an arrangement.
In hindsight, however, as the awkward first date in a courtship towards the eventual goal of matrimonial bliss, it makes much more sense.
1
The sad thing is that CVS will be paying $69 billion for something that ought to be worth a billion or two as a payment agent for a universal health care system. And CVS won't then yield to establishing such a rational and efficient system here in America.
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Back when things were looking up and Bertolini at al were part of the Obama brain trust for fixing healthcare and universal coverage, his expressed position was a splitting of insurer's dual roles.
The "insurer" would no longer bear the financial risk of indemnity for the actual insurance function, which could better be provided by the government, while the "insurers" would provide the paperwork of handling claims, premiums, etc. plus the task of managing the overall medical care of individuals in order to ensure their optimal health and therefore reduced costs (almost every large company already prefers that situation regarding the health insurance of its employees, a system known as self-insurance), and compete on the basis of their performance at those tasks.
In addition, Bertolini publicly noted that the continual decline of employer-provided health care would plague the insurance industry unless it moved to another source of people to insure; universal coverage being the obvious choice.
The collapse of this goal is no more the fault of industry executives who could see the problems and tried to find solutions than it is the fault of Obama and the Democrats, who faced an unprecedented smear and fear campaign by Fox News and its subsidiary the Republican party; to the point where fear of "socialized medicine" and "death panels" led to the crippled ACA, which is still too beneficent for the Republicans to tolerate its continued existence.
This isn't about healthcare. If it was it would be about patients instead of consumers. This is about corporate control of the public.
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We should all just go to the doctor much, much less. If you read "Overdiagnosed." you'll see what a huge racket "health care" has become.
The Republican Health Care Plan: Don't get sick...
A corporation's modus operandi is to make money. A mega-corporation is to make mega money. Unfettered capitalism leaves the less fortunate behind. Over regulated capitalism hinders growth. In a business mindset where the adage 'it's not personal it's business" governs, we rely on the decency and broader perspective of those in charge. History has seldom revealed wisdom and the appreciation of the bigger picture.
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