5 ms·
Have been googling Solvadi. Wow, curable hepatitis c is a big achievemt. But it‘s insanely expensive. It has to be taken daily for at least 12 weeks, with each
by tpetry 8y ago
Have been googling Solvadi. Wow, curable hepatitis c is a big achievemt. But it‘s insanely expensive. It has to be taken daily for at least 12 weeks, with each pill costing 400€! The chance of curing is at 90%.
- DenisM 8y agoIt was $100k per course at the time of introduction in the US, which resulted in a lot of hate. But it is a miracle. A close relative of mine was cured, and it had a profound effect on her quality of life. Gilead has very different prices in different regions, we sourced from a place that was much cheaper.
- exhilaration 8y agoSince your relative is cured, I don't think there's any harm in telling us what country you sourced the drug from.
- DenisM 8y agoIndia.
- tptacek 8y agoThat sounds pretty inexpensive. It looks like the previous standard of care cost $10-15,000 and wasn't generally curative. Meanwhile, the long-term cost of a progressing hep-c infection is quite high.
- metildaa 8y agoIn the context of a decietful medical system that bills pie in the sky amounts for rendering basic care, a $100k cure for Hepatitis C might seem reasonable. But those who need it most are dying due to this pricing scam, which is standard for our healthcare in the US.
- chimeracoder 8y ago> But those who need it most are dying due to this pricing scam, which is standard for our healthcare in the US. Those who need it most are dying not due to the "pricing scam", but because they're incarcerated and therefore prohibited from receiving curative HCV treatment, at any price. The sticker price is high, but it's meaningless, because almost nobody is going to be paying the sticker price. Also, if you want to make a statement about healthcare pricing in the US, Sovaldi is literally the worst example you could pick. For the first few years after it was available outside the US, Sovaldi was significantly cheaper in the US than in it was elsewhere.
- metildaa 8y agoThere are 3 million people living in the US with Hepatitis C, many who are needlessly dying from it are not incarcerated. The sticker price is a scam to make insurers feel good when they get double digit percentage discounts, while still lining Gileads pockets.
- tptacek 8y agoI'm sympathetic to the argument, but it doesn't have much to do with my point, and I'm more interested in the economics of new therapies than I am in a moral or political debate about how medicine is financed.
- mrep 8y agoWhat's your alternative then?
- chimeracoder 8y ago> There are 3 million people living in the US with Hepatitis C, many who are needlessly dying from it are not incarcerated. I was responding to the claim about people who need it the most. People who are incarcerated are, in fact, the people who benefit from curing HCV the most. And the price is not the reason they are unable to access it. > The sticker price is a scam to make insurers feel good when they get double digit percentage discounts, while still lining Gileads pockets. Even if you subscribe to the absurd notion that massive insurance companies incentivized by their bottom line could be oblivious to that dynamic and content with "feeling good" about an imaginary discount that lines their vendor's pockets, this argument falls apart when you look at how much the same medication costs in countries like Germany and France. Sovaldi costs about the same over there, and in fact, used to cost more than it did in the US (in addition to receiving approval much later than they did in the US).
- coretx 8y agoMove to a poor country and get a compulsory license for a local producer via a WTO procedure. This has been possible since the TRIPS agreement.