By James C. Sherlock
The featured image above is from my friends at AARP. We continue to work together to improve Virginia nursing homes.
Basic Medicaid and CHIP, which I support, are threatened by soaring costs.
I have recommended bringing Medicaid expansion home to the states to fund to protect the basic program at the federal level while addressing unsustainable federal borrowing.
This piece will address the increasing slope of the medical cost curve driven by new therapies very expensive to develop and to furnish through insurance.
Speaking frankly, the quickest way to lower therapy costs is to shut off the supply of new drugs. Once current ones age out of protected status, costs would indeed drop. But few will wish to go down that road with such therapies as individually-tailored cancer vaccines on the horizon.
A pessimist would say that since everyone eventually dies of something, it is not clear that life- and quality-of-life-extending therapies would actually lower the costs of medical care in the long run.
An optimist would point to the outsized costs of chronic diseases and take a different view.
But all of that is just jabber.
We begin this discussion knowing that government insurers will be pressured to cover the costs of new therapies. By the loudest voices. Including those of everyone who feels that they or their loved ones will be advantaged by the new drug.
But commercial insurers will not be so pressured, because individuals and businesses are cost sensitive.
Which brings us to the costs of GLP-1 drugs as a canary in the coal mine for Medicaid costs.
