Pharmaceutical companies often offer co-pay assistance to help commercially insured patients afford the co-payments that health plans impose on them for innovative prescription drugs. In an era when many insurance plans do not provide adequate coverage, the drug industry has come to the rescue. These co-pay cards are made available to commercially insured patients to help them access and stay on certain medicines for often life-threatening conditions. They come in to reduce large co-pays after determining the financial burden implied by the patient’s plan. In a study I co-authored, we find evidence of the figure below showing that, in recent years, co-pay assistance has reduced the amount that patients have had to meet with co-pays, even though overall co-pay amounts have been increasing. . . .
And, immodestly, I’ll give a shout-out to myself, writing on the topic of CEOs, corporatism, and politics:
[W]hat matters (or should matter) above all is what shareholders think. Not to quibble, but it is their company. That said, if those shareholders want their company to flourish (spoiler: they will), that, by definition, is going to involve attracting customers and (to generalize) retaining a contented, and, in some instances, even enthusiastic workforce. Contrary to the usual caricature, advocates of shareholder primacy recognize that companies operate in the real world, not in a ceteris paribus economic simulation. And in the real world, ignoring certain “stakeholders” (although I wouldn’t use that term, not least because of the connotation of ownership attendant to it) could prove very costly indeed. However, if a company’s fundamental purpose is to be redirected — even if only in part — away from the generation of shareholder return and toward the promotion of causes favored by the CEO and his or her colleagues in the C-suite, that is a type of expropriation. No amount of talk about the greater good can alter that inconvenient truth. . . .