Manufacturer assistance programmes and their eligibility rules posts 31–43

Nothing here is financial advice and none of it is a route to a transaction.

Adding a reference point for manufacturer assistance programmes. Mine is a single case, collected without controls, and I am posting the method alongside it so it can be discounted appropriately.

Post #29 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.

I would call the community position on manufacturer assistance programmes likely rather than established, and I would be comfortable defending that hedge.

Practical answer on manufacturer assistance programmes, since the theoretical one is upthread: do the simplest check first, write down the result, and only then decide whether the complicated explanation is needed. It usually is not.

The version of manufacturer assistance programmes that circulates here is a simplification of a simplification. It is not wrong, but it has lost the conditions under which it holds, and those conditions are where the interesting cases live.

Answering the question post #33 raises rather than the one it answers.

The cost of an independent submission is worth stating in these threads, because it is the main reason people do not do it.

That has been true for the cases I have seen and I have not seen many.

The arithmetic in post #37 is right; the assumption feeding it is the part to check.

Genuine question rather than a rhetorical one: has anyone here actually observed manufacturer assistance programmes, as opposed to read about it? The thread is long and I cannot tell.

Post #37 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.

Agreed on manufacturer assistance programmes, with one qualification that I think matters. The reasoning holds for the case as described. Change the starting assumption and it does not, and the starting assumption is the part nobody states.

Taking post #37 at face value and following it one step further.

Pharmacy acquisition cost: a pharmacy pays less than the patient pays, even at insurance rates. That margin is where the pharmacy's costs and profit live.

On reflection I would soften that slightly.

Second this, and I would have said it less carefully.

Picking up post #40: that is the part I would want checked first.

I changed my mind about manufacturer assistance programmes after someone here asked me for the source and I could not produce one. That is worth saying out loud because it is the ordinary way it happens.