Some great quotes from that interview:
We developed this fiction that insurers are on our side, they are in our corner, which is kind of crazy. We don’t think our car insurer is in our corner. But we have this notion that health insurers promote, that “we’re here to help you.” No, they’re just pass-throughs. They take in premiums and they pay out claims. As long as they can raise premiums and deductibles, their response to paying out claims that have higher and higher prices is mostly just to pay it. They don’t care. As one insurance salesman says in the book, “They are too big to care about you.” It’s too much trouble if they get a bill, as one patient did, for $117,000. It was out of network. He said, “Why is my insurer paying this?” I called the insurer, which was Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, and asked, “Why are you guys paying this? It’s for an assistant surgeon.” And they said, “To not pay it, we’d have to investigate it. We’d have to figure out what was done in the operating room. We’d probably have to take the guy to court because we don’t have a contract with him. It’s easier for us just to write the check.” And they said to me, “Oh, are you going to write about this? Because we don’t want the other surgeons to know that they can get away with it.”
...
Instead of competition and a bunch of drugs bringing down price, you have this phenomenon in pharmaceuticals called “sticky pricing,” where everything just goes up to the highest price. That’s partly a flaw of our system, where we give the same patent to “me, too” drugs as we do to the really true innovators. It’s also a flaw of our philosophy that profit motives will give us the right answer. Because with all these companies making a lot of money from MS drugs, those drugs haven’t really been tested against each other and it’s in no one’s interest to know which one’s actually better because, hey, yours might not be the one that wins.