The new Inflation Reduction Act contains the first-ever provision allowing the federal government to actually negotiate some drug prices instead of paying whatever the greedy pharmaceutical companies demand. The U.S. is the only major country that doesn’t routinely do this, which is why a) non-generic drug prices are often astronomical and b) we pay prices that are multiples of what people in other countries pay. Needless to say, this did not go unnoticed by the pharmaceutical companies, which have been lobbying and fear-mongering for more than a century to defeat any and all measures to rein in prices and their

Out-of-pocket maximum (OOPM) is the most you have to pay for covered services in a single year, aside from premiums. Once you reach your out-of-pocket max, your plan pays 100 percent of the allowed amount for covered services. For instance, if you rack up $25,000 in medical bills and your OOPM is $7,000, that’s the maximum you have to pay, while your insurance company has to pay the balance of $18,000. You’ve no doubt heard about “surprise” medical bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but when you drill into it, that’s almost always because the policyholder used out-of-network