My guess is this is simply a way of increasing the income of the Primary Care Physician.and baffling in others (such as requiring an in person visit to the PCP to refill a prescription for a drug that has been part of the regimen for 15+ years). So different institutional obstacles.
Many countries use a "gatekeeper" model a la the British NHS - you can't see a specialist without a referral from your General Practitioner. (Nowadays it can be impossible to get a GP and hence Catch-22).
So I may be too cynical -- by half. But in a number of European countries, there are things like property transfers that can only happen with a Notary Public's stamp, and it's a closed shop and they charge huge fees. So thinking by analogy.
(I was specifically thinking of Japan - my understanding is that physicians there get a lot of their income via fees from pharmaceutical companies?)
Statistics: Posted by Valuethinker — Wed Jul 17, 2024 11:54 am — Replies 9 — Views 1536