Healthcare costs vary not just across hospitals, doctors, and procedures, but prescription costs as well. Many times there are so many partners layered into the logistics of the healthcare industry, that costs become grossly inflated for including everyone’s service. The problem isn’t always that there are so many partners involved, but that there’s no way to compare options as seen in this article.
From PBS:
“Insurance copays are higher than the cost of the drug about 25 percent of the time, according to a study published in March by the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.
USC researchers analyzed 9.5 million prescriptions filled during the first half of 2013. They compared the copay amount to what the pharmacy was reimbursed for the medication and found in the cases where the copay was higher, the overpayments averaged $7.69, totaling $135 million that year.”