4 ms·
>Gilead Sciences is charging $84,000 for a course of treatment and there isn’t enough money to treat every patient. Gilead offers the same treatment in Egypt fo
by carlmr 9y ago
>Gilead Sciences is charging $84,000 for a course of treatment and there isn’t enough money to treat every patient. Gilead offers the same treatment in Egypt for $900. (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hepatitis-egypt-gilead-sc... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hepatitis-egypt-gilead-sc...)
The free market solution would be to send your patients to Egypt to get treated. Ecnonomy class flight + drugs = $2000 (maybe $3000 from Hawaii).
The biggest issue with American health care is if you have something acute that needs immediate treatment. Then you're f*ed. But for 95% of non-acute cases, travel to Latin America, travel to Europe, travel to North Africa, or Asia and get the drugs + plane ticket at out of pocket prices lower than your co-pay.
I know this is ecologically terrible in terms of CO2, but it's what I would be doing in that case.
- dagw 9y agoOf course the only reason Gilead feels comfortable charging $900 to Egypt is that they believe they have the market fairly well segmented. If that market segmentation where to disintegrate then the prices in Egypt would rapidly rise (and prices in the US would no doubt fall).
- omegaham 9y agoI spent several years stationed in Yuma, AZ, and a lot of people would come to Yuma to do just that. They can't afford a procedure in the US, or they're waitlisted to oblivion in Canada, so they fly into Yuma, take a shuttle across the border, and have it done in Algodones. As always, you need to be smart, but people are willing to take the risk of complications if it means the difference between a modest expense and facing a medical bankruptcy. The same thing applies with dental work. All of my wife's root canals were done in Mexico.