Relevant: the US spends double the amount of other countries on healthcare, yet has a life expectancy 3 years shorter.
Mark Cuban's project of selling off-brand medication for cheap is great - insurance companies don't want to work with them, but if said insurance companies still require their customers to pay for medication and that project is even cheaper than that, they'll get competed out of the market.
Also that free market thing is a lie, it's in the medical industry's interest to keep prices high and to not have competition / undercutting happen.
It's great and going to help a lot of people. But it's still not cheap compared to a lot of other countries which either provide free medication or medication for a fixed fee per item (usually around $10-20, varies by country).
E.g. Medicare has a substantially higher demand for drugs than most single payer universal healthcare systems due to a combination of number of people covered plus covering mostly older, more expensive, patients. It's larger than the UK's NHS for example. But Medicare is subject to various legal restrictions on their ability to negotiate the best prices possible, while the NHS can use whatever leverage it pleases.
I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of the US healthcare system, but why wouldn't insurance companies work with off-brand medications? If it costs less it's good for them, no?
If the 60% profit margin is illegally high, then no, it's worse. They'd be better off paying more money for the same thing.
There is a tax incentive at work here as well. Individuals enrolled in high-deductible health plans (HDHP) can often receive a federal income tax break, so you have to factor that in when calculating your net cost.
Deductibles are generally going higher because healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies raise prices every year, and because we have an increasingly unhealthy population that demands more services. Insurers try to hold down those increases but with limited success, so they pass those costs on to their customers (employers), and those customers in turn pass on the higher costs to their employees.
What's better?
(Why can’t it be both?)
I am also curious to understand if European, UK and Asian healthcare systems suffer from substandard care problem.
To be precise: sugar without enough fiber causes illness. With enough fiber, as is provided by all fruit except grapes, sugar absorption is delayed long enough that intestinal bacteria get to eat most of it. Keep your intestinal bacteria fed; if not, they eat you.