The NY Times editorial board published an opinion on the price of the new hep C drug yesterday which is very enlightening, but unfortunately it isn't open for comments. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Sovaldi costs $84,000 for a standard 12 week course, or $1000 per pill. Some patients require a course that is twice as long, costing $168K. It is not a stand-alone. This drug is taken combined with the standard pills and injections treatment that has been the standard therapy. This combination can achieve a 90% cure rate, an improvement over other recent drugs in this category that have up to 75% cure rate and that cost $25K to $50K per course. Apparently hep C figures into 15,000 deaths per year. About 3-4 million Americans are infected with the virus, and most don't even know it. Symptoms, if they ever occur, don't appear for two to three decades. In other countries a six month course is being marketed at $2,000. That's how much more Americans pay $168K vs $2K.
Clearly this drug is an advance in treatment, a wonderful thing, but we need to have a look at how our society is going to deal with these costs, and rules governing Pharma. We need to keep an eye on their shenanigans and price fixing and their iron grip on all our legislators on both sides of the aisle as well as the White House. And we also need to draw attention to the TPP, that transpacific trade pact, that has all kinds of protections for Pharma, invalidating laxer patent laws in other countries, shutting down production in countries that are making drugs to save lives, raising prices in other countries rather than bringing down the prices charged to us. For my 13 suggestions to address drug prices see below.