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Another way to look at the huge price tag to cure 90% ($227 billion) is that this would could eventually give us herd immunity. We could then treat this at a l
by bargl 13y ago
Another way to look at the huge price tag to cure 90% ($227 billion) is that this would could eventually give us herd immunity. We could then treat this at a lower cost per year going forward. That thought is mind boggling.
While the cost is high in the USA the drug company is basically subsidizing their own distribution to other countries based on the GDP of the buyer. WOW, honestly that sounds like a pretty darn awesome thing to me. That $1000 price tag on those drugs is similar to a $10 price tag per day on other drugs to people in other countries where they make $1 per day. It just makes this drug more attainable for everyone and if that is Actually what they are doing I applaud them.
Sure I don't want to pay $1000 per day for this drug, but is it ok for us to drive the cost down relative to our cost of living and make it prohibitively expensive for others?
This is also what they did with some of the better drugs for curing MDR TB. I only know that because of the book Mountains Beyond Mountains. Where the better drugs were nearly unattainable for the poorer countries.
- Xylakant 13y agoThis is a cure, not a vaccine, so herd immunity does not apply. Once you get cured, you can get reinfected. Curing every person suffering from hepatitis C would reduce the potential for infections though.
- revelation 13y agoInteresting, I had the exact opposite reaction to that line. There is no "subsidizing their own distribution" here, making the drug is dead cheap and distribution isn't even an item on their budget. No, what this means is they are setting their prices to extract the maximum possible amount of money out of each country. Obviously, the price that will yield the largest profit is not always the highest; if you can get four times as many customers at half the price, you doubled your profit while reducing your price.
- Houshalter 13y agoIt pays for the cost of researching this drug (and all the other drugs which failed before making it to market) and it creates an incentive to produce more drugs like this in the future. You don't want drugs to cost so much? Encourage the government(s) to fund or subsidize research. Maybe even lower barriers to entry to getting drugs approved. But no one is forcing you to buy the drug and the patent will eventually expire.
- revelation 13y agoI want to end this charade of free market and capitalism. It's obviously not capitalism or a free market if a company can maximize their prices to fit each countries GDP and not be instantly killed by arbritrators. It's not a good fit, which is presumably why even the current market doesn't resemble a free market at all, but the illusion is unnecessarily costing a lot of money and wasted productivity.
- Houshalter 13y agoHow is that not a free market, let alone capitalism? That's how club goods work. The cost per individual is low, but the total cost is high. In those cases it makes sense to have different prices for different regions, or even different individuals. A poor person in Egypt can't afford $1,000 a day. But if they charged everyone the Egypt price, they wouldn't make enough money to even cover the cost of researching it. Besides that's not an argument for why it's bad. Your just saying you don't like it because it doesn't look like what you think a free market looks like.