My wife's doctor gave her a prescription for a new drug to be used once a week (a self-injection), suggesting that she check with the insurance company to make sure it's covered.
The good news: it is covered. The bad news: the co-pay is 28% of the cost.
The price quoted by the pharmacy is $5,280 PER DOSE. Even after insurance, that leaves our out of pocket cost at over $1500. Every week.
I did a little math and the new medicine works out to be almost 16 MILLION DOLLARS a pound. Is there anything on earth that's worth 16 million dollars a pound?
Looks like she'll be staying with the medicine she's already on. That one is only $600 every six weeks.
I have one thing to say to drug companies, and that is (with apologies to Elizabeth for stealing her line) BITE ME!
Remmy
PS: Feel free to check my math. Dosage is 150mg. There are around 453,000 mg in a pound, or about 3024 doses. Each dose is $5,280.
Sorry Remmy,
There is some price gouging that goes on. In fact, a bunch of companies got in trouble recently for price fixing generics. I’m proud to say the company I work for has never been implicated in wrongdoing like that (at least that I know of).
Pharmaceuticals like biologics are not cheap. This can’t always be attributed to greed by the industry.
I did a quick calculation based on a manufacturing cost value I know, and 150mg of the product I work mostly on costs about $200 to make. That’s the raw drug, it does not include the filling into the container and the packaging that the doctor would eventually receive. It doesn’t include all the cost overhead like the testing that is done on every batch (overhead like my salary). It doesn’t include the rough approximation of $100 million it cost to develop the drug, nor takes into account probably 10 other similar drugs were invested in that failed and never made it to patients (or resulted in revenue for the company).
And that’s cost, not pricing. Pricing involves making a profit. If a company doesn’t think it can make $billions on a drug, then usually it’s not good business to bother with it. I don’t know what a shot of my drug is priced at, but the dose is not 150mg, so it’s not mine. You also don’t need the shot that often.
Want to really fix this, well I’ll say something even the executives at my company wouldn’t like. Medicare for everyone with appropriate regulatory oversight to ensure no price gouging occurs.
You gotta be real careful though. Squeeze companies the least little bit too much and you severely stifle innovation. And patients don’t get their life changing meds. And people die.
And if someone tells me that for your wife to get her meds will mean an increase in my taxes, then I will happily pay.