[samsamsam]

Quote:

Sovaldi costs $84,000 for a course of treatment. Add in other therapies that supplement Sovaldi, and now you’re talking about $100,000 or so to treat a single patient. To use Sovaldi to treat each of the 3 million hepatitis C patients in the United States, it would cost around $300 billion, or about the same amount we annually spend for all other drugs combined.

Gilead deserves a reasonable return on their investment. Gilead did not invent Sovaldi, but it bought the company that did for $11 billion. That took insight and the willingness to accept risk. It also took a complete lack of self-awareness — and unmitigated gall — to price Sovaldi the way Gilead has.

Hepatitis C patients in the U.S. are mostly uninsured, underinsured and/or incarcerated. Medicaid, the VA and our prison system bear the brunt of the cost impact, and by extension so do all of us as taxpayers. Sure, we could ask these patients to pay more, but coming up with a 10% copay is already tough enough for drugs that cost hundreds of dollars, let alone $1,000 per pill.

Sovaldi costs about $130 to manufacture, reinforcing how outrageous its pricing is. Gilead claims that the pricing reflects the value of Sovaldi and it deserves a premium because of downstream health savings. Following that logic, all antibiotics have been vastly underpriced since the introduction of penicillin some 60 years ago.

In Germany, the cost for Sovaldi is around $67,000 for a course of therapy. In Canada and the U.K., it’s about $55,000. While these are no India or Egypt cut-rate deals, these prices still represent a significant discount to what we’re being asked to shoulder in the U.S.

I heard it took 300M to develop. Interesting the pricing differences. I think the primary difference is national healthcare vs what the US has. Wowza...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecar...ns-to-pay/