EDITORIAL: Express Scripts went from zero to $67 billion in 32 years, a symptom of American health care costs
That it grew so quickly into the nation's 22nd-largest industrial corporation -- the largest ever to call
Health care is now 17.9 percent of the American economy; prescription drugs are 17 percent of health care costs and growing faster than any other part.
In 1986,
Pharmacy-benefits management companies put a lot of corner drugstores out of business. Mom and pop couldn't compete with companies that bought drugs by the truckload.
No one knows for sure because, like most other parts of the health care industry, the pharmacy-benefits management business is opaque. That no one knows why drugs, procedures, doctors and equipment cost what they do is a big reason Americans pay the highest drug and health care prices in the world.
Politicians, including President
So the market will try to do it. Insurance companies have taken over the business, eliminating other middle men in the crowded space between doctors and their patients.
On the horizon, perhaps, is Amazon, the 900-pound retailing gorilla, which may begin selling prescription drugs like it sells everything else.
Rising health care and drug costs are so intractable that, eventually, public outrage will cause the federal government to step in.
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