Welcome to the Specialty Pharmacy Collaboration Summit podcast series. Joining us today is Robert Popovian, Senior Director, US Government Relations, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.
What are the biggest challenges that you face presently with rising healthcare costs?
Robert: Well, healthcare costs are increasing. We are close to about 20% of our GDP is spent on healthcare expenditures and that number is going to continuously go up, just because of the demographics in the United States.
If you look at spending and healthcare in general with regards to pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical spending has risen slowly and overall healthcare spending – as well as other healthcare segments in the last few years – and the price increases have been pretty much in line with the other segments of healthcare.
The challenge that we have with healthcare expenditures in the United States is that we have a very dysfunctional payment mechanism in the US where we are challenged with an outdated insurance policy model where we don’t necessarily pay for the best interventions in healthcare because of the mechanisms of reimbursement where we have pharmaceuticals vs. hospital payments vs. outpatient payments vs. other services being paid separately. Because of that, no one cost beneficial intervention is the one that is put in the front of the others.
To hear more from Robert, please join him at IIR's Specialty Pharmacy Collaboration Summit, September 15-17 in Boston. Also, you can save an EXTRA $100 off the current rate when registering with the code: XP1968BLOG - Register now.
See you in Boston!
No comments:
Post a Comment