Next Time Around, I'd Like to Be a Pharmaceutical Company
According to James Surowiecki in this week's New Yorker, the miracle drug Sovaldi will cure hepatitis C, but a single dose costs one thousand dollars, and the full treatment costs eighty grand . . . and your average hepatitis C patient makes 23,000 dollars a year, and 3.2 million Americans have hepatitis C . . . and because the people taking the drugs aren't really paying much of the cost, and insurers are obligated to cover a drug that doctors deem necessary (but insurers have "virtually zero" ability to negotiate price when a drug has no equivalent) a very strange economy has been created (and by very strange, I mean that taxpayers are going to foot the bill for our half-assed hybrid sort-of-subsidized health care situation . . . although, to play devil's advocate, perhaps eighty grand is a bargain, if it means you won't have to treat a person for a lifetime of complications for hepatitis C).
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7 comments:
It costs a lot to develop a drug so the prices are high to recoup the investment.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629602001261
you're no fun.
if the insurance subsidy didn't exist and the drugs were sold on more of a free market, would it be worth developing the drugs?
Also, that article costs $39.95 to read. Not kidding. Ridiculous.
Also, let's accept that it costs $400 million to $800 million to create a drug. How much of that cost is labor? And how much of those labor rates are inflated by virtue of working in the pharma industry, i.e., is this another circular argument that ends in "that's just what it costs, a la higher ed tuition?
Not sure why I started two comments with Also when I had t commented prior.
also, this blog cures the hepatitis blues.
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