Even if they have health insurance, Americans routinely face surprisingly high charges at the pharmacy counter. A radical-sounding solution would drastically curtail this experience and save billions of dollars in the bargain: End insurance coverage for low-cost generic drugs, which represent 90 percent of all prescriptions.
Health insurance once made essential medicines affordable and, for expensive brand-name drugs that can treat cancer or control rare diseases, it still does. But as insurance and intermediary practices have evolved, they have made generics pricier.