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No profiteering on swine flu shots
If we needed yet another example of what's wrong with health care in this country, we got it.
Sharing the headlines with reform this summer has been concern about the H1N1 -- better known as swine flu -- virus. As fall arrives, health officials are worried that the highly contagious and potentially deadly virus could mean big problems.
Drug companies have come up with a vaccine that will be available to those most susceptible to the virus in a matter of weeks. Our government paid for those vaccines.
Or, put more accurately, we paid for those vaccines with our tax dollars.
Earlier this summer, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the availability of $350 million in grants to help states prepare for H1N1 and the fall flu season. A total of $260 million in public health emergency response grants will go to local agencies, like health departments, to help with things like vaccination campaigns.
Ninety million dollars in hospital preparedness grants will be distributed nationwide to help those institutions ready for a potential surge in patients an outbreak could cause.
These millions are in addition to whatever sum Uncle Sam is paying the five companies it hired to produce the actual vaccine.
That the government would use our money to help protect us from a pandemic flu seems appropriate and logical. That the amounts are staggering is evident.
Doctors will receive the vaccine, along with syringes and other necessary supplies, free of charge.
Here's the rub.
Even though, from what we can tell, the heavy lifting to deliver this shot to the public has been done by the federal government, health care providers will, in all likelihood, collect a fee for the service.
While doctors cannot charge for the vaccine itself, so far the government has not yet set any limits on what health care providers can charge in administrative fees associated with giving the vaccine.
That leaves the doctors in the driver's seat when it comes to setting a price for the administration of the shots.
One area doctor's office we spoke with last week said that patients would pay their co-pay. The problem with this standard operating procedure is that except for five minutes of a nurse's time and a little paperwork, the shot isn't costing the doctors a thing.
The $20 co-pay that millions of Americans have grown used to paying is an opportunity for physicians to profit at a staggering level.
Doctors should assess the true cost of giving the shot and offer it at rock bottom prices. The nurses and office staff are being paid for their time and, in all honesty, everything else even remotely associated with this vaccine has already been paid for by taxpayers.
Setting the price at $5 a shot certainly wouldn't do any harm to the doctors' bottom line. It could be a real shot in the arm for their financially challenged patients.
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