Patriot Act: “Drug Pricing” Episode Recap & Review

A System Gone Mad

Living in the United Kingdom, I am incredibly grateful and appreciative for our health service. Funded through taxes on our wages, our healthcare is free and affordable albeit rife with eye-wateringly long wait times for A&E. Our American cousins however, are not so fortunate. Caught in a whirlwind of greed and profit, drug and insuranc companiese have profited big-time on the medicinal industry and with over 48% of the population reliant on medication to survive, it’s a rotten system in desperate need of purging.

Step forward Hasan Minhaj who returns this week to shine a light on the corrupt, crazy world of drug pricing in the US. Now, it’s worth mentioning at this point that anyone outside America may have a hard time following the jokes and bulk of content here which is strictly geared toward the way this healthcare system is set up. Despite this, Hasan does a good job mixing his usual array of pop-culture analogies with archival footage to really get the facts and underlying message across.

Americans, by comparison, are likely to get a lot out of this and seeing the cost of Insulin raise as high as it has is, quite frankly, shocking. Given this is medicine that some people need to survive, it’s absolutely ludicrous that companies can get away with, as Hasan says himself, the medicinal equivalent of Narcos. It’s a system that constantly passes the buck too, as described via a colourful panel on the ground which shows just how little responsibility the country is taking to tackle this.

From PBMs to insurance companies through to the government itself and drug companies, the entire system appears broken from the inside, out. Thankfully, in true Hasan style there is a light at the end of the tunnel. This charade of raising prices and expecting people to cough up hundreds for the sake of profit is a bubble that may well be bursting sooner rather than later thanks to a Senate meeting being called. While the outcome of this is still up for debate, hopefully this alleviates the pressures on hardworking Americans.

Patriot Act continues to suffer from the same weird stylistic choices with the camera angles as mentioned before but Drug Pricing is an important episode nonetheless and one that Americans will certainly take to. Those watching from international countries may not understand all the references or begin to comprehend this crazy world of pharmaceutical companies profiting over necessities. It’s an important topic nonetheless though and one that shines a spotlight on a very shocking and alarming reality.