What is the price of human life?
How willing is the society to bear the cost of treatment and when do you let someone die to "save" money?
Take a drug like kymriah with a price tag of 370000 swiss francs that is usually the last hope for people with lymphatic cancer and even then there survival isn't 100% guaranteed. Clearly the price is very high and out of reach for majority. Only the super rich can afford it.
This is incredibly sad considering the drug was developed by tax payers money and production cost is only about 55000 francs.
There are other anticancer drugs that are produced for 1$ per tablet but sold to patients at 750$. Currently the FDA has approved the world's most expensive drug, zolgensma costing $2.1 million. Who really sets this crazy prices and where and when does it stop?
The amount you pay for a brand-name drug will depend on your insurance plan; the plan’s formulary, or list of drugs it prefers and covers; the size of your deductible; and the deal your insurance company has worked out with the drug’s manufacturer, among dozens of other variables. How such discounts are negotiated is proprietary, carefully guarded by the system’s various players.
There’s a lot of finger-pointing over who is to blame for rising prices, particularly between drug companies and PBMs, or the middlemen that negotiate rebates and discounts for health plans. It all starts with the manufacturers: companies that develop new treatments and conduct clinical trials. There are essentially no regulations governing how drugs are priced. Instead, pharmaceutical companies select a price based on a drug’s estimated value, which typically translates into what they “believe the market will bear,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. For drugs entering a crowded disease category with multiple other options, the calculus is different. In such cases, a new treatment will typically be priced similarly to its competitors.
For drug price legislation to be effective, they recommend legislation that requires all supply chain participants to report true prices, including discounts and rebates.
Current regulatory policy fails to cultivate price transparency and negotiation, which allows pharmaceutical manufacturers to “charge whatever they please
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