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Insurers Pay Big Markups as Doctors Dispense Drugs
When a pharmacy sells the heartburn drug Zantac, each pill costs about 35 cents. But doctors dispensing it to patients in their offices have charged nearly 10 times that price, or $3.25 a pill.
The same goes for a popular muscle relaxant known as Soma, insurers say. From a pharmacy, the per-pill price is 60 cents. Sold by a doctor, it can cost more than five times that, or $3.33.
At a time of soaring health care bills, experts say that doctors, middlemen and drug distributors are adding hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the costs borne by insurance companies, employers and taxpayers through the practice of physician dispensing.
Read the full story: http://tinyurl.com/bv8kp5t
Source: The New York Times
Impact of Medicaid Institution for Mental Diseases Exclusion on Serious Mental Illness Outcomes
December 17th 2025Medicaid’s Institution for Mental Diseases (IMD) rule bars federal funding for psychiatric facilities with more than 16 beds, but findings indicate that state waivers allowing treatment of serious mental illness in IMDs do not increase overall psychiatric hospitalizations.
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