Everybody loves free stuff, right?
And everybody knows health insurance is too expensive.
Politicians love to trumpet all the free healthcare services they can mandate for you. But these services are never really free. The doctors who provide “free” physicals still get paid. The tech people that do your “free” mammogram still get paid.
And the companies that make the “free” vaccines still get paid. A lot. Very few people/companies get paid the way drug manufacturers get paid. The fact that the end users of such products are shielded from the price exacerbates the problems with the cost of health care and, thus, health insurance.
To see what I mean, let’s look a bit closer at the vaccine industry. Children today are given many times more vaccines than in previous generations. And times are good for the pharmaceutical industry. Consider these 2012 profits from the top 15 vaccines:
- Prevnar 13® – $3.718 billion – Pfizer
- Gardasil® – $1.900 billion – Merck & Co/Sanofli Pasteur MSD
- PENTAct-HIB – $1.522 billion – Sanofli/Sanofli Pasteur MSD
- Infanrix/Pediarix – $1.183 billion – by GlaxoSmithKline
- Fluzone – $1.152 billion – by Sanofli/Sanofli Pasteur MSD
- Hepatitis franchise – $986 million – by GlaxoSmithKline
- Varivax – $846 million – by Merck & Co/Sanofli Pasteur MSD
- Menactra – $735 million – by Sanofli/Sanofli Pasteur
- Zostavax – $651 million – by Merck & Co/Sanofli Pasteur
- RotaTeq® – $648 million – by Merck & Co/Sanofli Pasteur
- Synflorix® – $587 million – by GlaxoSmithKline
- Pneumovax®23 – $580 million – by Merck & Co/Sanofli Pasteur
- Rotarix – $549 million – by GlaxoSmithKline
- Adacel – $469 million – by Sanofli/Sanofli Pasteur MSD
- Prevnar – $399 million – by Pfizer
* Source 1; Source 2
Not bad, eh?
The point here is to try to illustrate some of the reasons that your health insurance premiums are so expensive. The insurance companies are not Pollyannas, to be sure, but neither are they the source of all that is wrong in the system.
We hear all the time from people who are frustrated with the cost of health insurance, and we share in their frustrations. If you’d like to discuss your personal insurance situation to see if there are more affordable alternatives out there, please contact us today.