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Cystic Fibrosis Gene Correction Drug Approved by the FDA
tguyton writes "The good news: the FDA just approved the distribution of the first drug to treat the underlying cause of Cystic Fibrosis, called Kalydeco by Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The bad news: this drug will only affect 4% of patients with the disease in the U.S. From the article: '[Affected patients] with the so-called G551D mutation have a defective protein that fails to balance the flow of chloride and water across the cell wall, leading to the buildup of internal mucus. The vast majority of cystic fibrosis patients have a different genetic defect, in which the protein does not reach the cell wall. Vertex is developing another drug to try and address that problem. Study data for that drug is expected later this year.' Hopefully the research involved will be applicable to finding treatments for other genetic diseases."
Further bad news: "...executives said Kalydeco would cost $294,000 for a year's supply, placing it among the most expensive prescription drugs sold in the U.S."
What is the co-pay on that? :)
I've lost a friend to CF and even if this wouldn't have helped her, it is still good news. Anything that can help save lives. Already those with CF live longer and better lives as a whole. I hope some day CF can be treated enough to extend lives to normal ranges.
Good lord, we are animals not plants. There is no such thing as a "cell wall" in our cells! Call it what it is: the cell membrane.
Pedantic? Yes, but the definitions are precise and are intended to be used precisely. Journalism like this makes me want to gouge my eyes out; a single high-school biology class teaches cell wall vs. cell membrane!
Just so no one gets confused, this molecule goes by 3 common names VX-770 and Ivacaftor and Kalydeco
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalydeco
There are not three separate drugs for the same problem etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Can anyone explain a bit about how this drug works? I understand CF is caused be a genetic "error", but is this an exon skipping drug (similar to what they're working on with muscular dystrophy) or is this something different?
Further bad news: "...executives said Kalydeco would cost $294,000 for a year's supply, placing it among the most expensive prescription drugs sold in the U.S."
Early adopters can use it, and the price will be driven down for everyone, just like the cost of sequencing your own genome.
My question is, what drug is more expensive?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Or given only 4% of 1 in 2000 need it, we could treat everyone if we all chipped in 2c a day.
Obviously they're playing chicken with the insurance companies, trying to get them to pay out the nose. But would it be better to not publicize these expensive innovations, but only make them available to rich doctors that treat rich patients? Then after the R&D has been recouped, release the knowledge of them to patients of more limited means.
Otherwise, you're just dangling it in front of the poor/ uninsured. Hey, we could keep your kid alive, but neener, neener, neener.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Communist!
Haida Manga
That sounds like universal health care.
From my understanding, those suffering from CF in California generally have their bills picked up by the state since no insurance plan could ever afford to treat CF patients. I believe this is under the state's Genetically Handicapped Persons Program.
But not having CF myself, I'm certainly no expert on the cost of care for it...
I don't know if it will be in time, but the cost might be as big an issue as you expect
"Wysenski said Vertex would provide the medicine for free to people with no insurance and household income of $150,000 or less. The company will also cover 30 percent of copay costs for select patients who have insurance."
I hope for the best.
I stole this Sig
The news that some people with CF might be saved will devastate her? Sounds like she has problems beyond her son's health.
That would seem to depend on how much of the price tag is production costs and how much is "Because we can, would you prefer to suffocate on your own mucus, sickie?"...
Pharmaceutical manufacturers certainly aren't known for their charitable pricing; but the economies of scale for a specialty drug with a few thousand users have got to be pretty lousy.
There is an effective vaccine for polio, but a quick search reveals there is no cure for existing patients other than hoping the immune system deals with the virus in time (90-95% of people can do this)...
When the drug company provides some of your co-pay, they are in effect, jacking the cost of their product up, charging the insurance company, and giving some of that money back to the patient. The overall effect is mo money, mo money, mo money for the drug company.
The insurance companies don't like this. They are already trying to stop drug company co-pay cards. Co-pays incentivize the patients into choosing cheaper drugs. Co-pay kickbacks from the drug companies mess with this. Expect the insurance companies to fight back. The simpliest way to do this is to declare the drug to be experimental.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
From a radio report, apparently they will also provide it free for uninsured people who earn less than $150k, so they'll be treating more than they'll be getting paid for.
Polio is the ONLY named disease for which medicine has ever proceeded to effect a ' CURE'.
What? Polio is still around, while small pox has been eradicated in the wild. Plus, we have cures for Pellagra, Scurvy, and all sorts of other named disease...
Me thinks there be a troll here...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Posting anon 'cause I've already modded.
My wife has MS and takes Tysabri (Natalizumab).
It started off costing us (and the insurance co.) $6000 a month. However Bio-gen began a copay/deductible assistance program after they saw how the price was keeping people from access to the drug. This has made our costs manageable. And I'm sure it's helped hundreds, if not thousands of people.
I bet (and hope) the same thing will happen to this drug.
It also isn't much good if you're not a plant or bacterium.
[Affected patients] with the so-called G551D mutation have a defective protein that fails to balance the flow of chloride and water across the cell wall
The vast majority of cystic fibrosis patients have a different genetic defect, in which the protein does not reach the cell wall.
May I oblige?
Does anyone know how these pills are priced, and what kind of margin these companies make? Those prices seem INSANE.
My brother lost his 18 year old son to cancer.
When your kid is that sick, there are no problems beyond their health. Call it a common human failing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Polio still exists, try going to a hospital in Sub-Saharan Africa. Eminently vaccine preventable, just politics unfortunately. Smallpox was declared eradicated in the late 70s.
We never and still don't have a cure for Small Pox, we have a vaccine. And, while I'm not an expert, saying that we have a "cure" for Scurvy is just silly. I'm not really supporting the GP here, I don't really know, but your examples aren't much better.
The fact that there's a market of only 4000 for it is why the per-unit cost is so high. It isn't about the cost of manufacturing the drug (at least not primarily). It's because they need to charge enough to recoup their expenses developing and testing the drug. It's a necessary part of a profit-driven medical research system. (A possible solution is left as an exercise for the reader.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's not a cure, it's a lifelong treatment. Too bad that life will be one of poverty.
I would think 294k would make it the MOST expensive drug... I have to imagine there is some chemotherapy that are expensive... but that seems insane... considering that it doesn't cure the problem, just mitigates it.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Well, since patent lifetimes are 20 years, that's only $5,880,000 per person assuming that they live for that long. I wonder how much it cost to develop - it seems at nearly $6 million per person they easily stand to recoup their costs and make a sick profit.
So ($294,000 * .20)*.70 = $41,160... That's what's left even after your co-pay and the drug company's assistance. That's still far out of reach for a hell of alot of people. We're talking about a single drug, this isn't including all the regular doctor's bills these people are paying as well.
For some reason, people in this country think the system works the way it is...I could pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars that i don't even have to keep someone alive, or i can go to jail for negligence or even murder if I just let them die...
We spend ~$30billion a year on research in the U.S. on the NIH, so a partial solution is already in place.
The other thing to keep in mind is this drug is only highly priced for the next 20 years. After that the generic versions will be cheap, so future patients will benefit hugely. That's the beauty of the patent system. It hasn't been outrageously extended to hell like the copyright system has.
Oh, stop. The Party line here is to bash on big evil pharma until all drugs are produced for free by unicorns from fields of biodiverse flora.
Turn in your geek badge. You're going all mainstream with your facts and reality and pragmatism.
We never and still don't have a cure for Small Pox, we have a vaccine. And, while I'm not an expert, saying that we have a "cure" for Scurvy is just silly. I'm not really supporting the GP here, I don't really know, but your examples aren't much better.
Oh, I totally agree that we don't have cures for Polio and Small Pox... but if the GP asserts that we have cured Polio, then we have cured Small Pox. (From a generic population as an organism sense, by vaccinating the population we have cured the population of that disease.)
However, while Pellagra and Scurvy are both malnourishment conditions, their cure is the missing nutrient. If anything, they're the best example of a cure. You have an disease, you are treated with the cure, and you are cured of the disease. The fact that the cure are simple nutrients instead of complicated drugs is basically moot.
In the same way, the antidote for 4-Hydroxycoumarins rat poison is just vitamin K... does that make it not an antidote? You know, because it's just a nutritional supplement instead of an actual opposing drug?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Saddly it's about a decade too late for my college roomie with CF. He was brilliant and very funny, a good friend and a great programer. We're all a bit poorer every day this disease continues to kill.
-GiH
The best way to deal with Cystic Fibrosis is for Carriers to go the IVF route so they don't pass the gene on to their kids. All this "CURE" will do is make it so that CF isn't as lethal making it propagate out as a benign disease when in truth it will just be making a population dependent on drugs to live. A real Cure would be a gene therapy that removes the defect from every cell in the patients body so they don't have to continue taking it for the rest of their life, and have no risk of passing it on to their kids.
So their offer might not be as good as I thought.
Honestly I have no idea what a good system would be.
Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane.
But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive. And there's still the question of how to price these things. It's entirely possible that it would not have been economical for them to develop the drug without charging $300,000 for a prescription, but when a drug is literally a lifesaver it's hard to come up with an appropriate number.
I stole this Sig
We spend ~$30billion a year on research in the U.S. on the NIH, so a partial solution is already in place.
Thats fine, except for covering testing costs as well. How many millions does it take just to get the FDA to allow? Well lets see what I found out from Google:
$802 million
"His name was James Damore."
Vertex has a very generous patient assistance program for this drug. It's *free* for those without insurance and who make less than $150k/year, and for others there's a generous co-pay assistance program. This drug will be available for everyone who needs it. We've spent 10 years and I don't even know how many hundreds of millions of dollars developing this drug, and helping save lives is what keeps us motivated every day.
---
of course, I don't speak for Vertex.
Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster and his noodly appendages, I live in Canada.
Hopefully the researchers in the evil ignorant US will share what they've learned with the enlightened Canadians.
I think more of this cost reflects attempts to recoup the R&D costs with the tiny userbase. I wonder how many insurance companies will cover it? I'm guessing not very many.
I read the internet for the articles.
We do have a 'cure' for scurvy - vitamin C, as well as Pellegra (a vitamin B deficiency). So, Snowgirl is correct - we can cure those diseases simply by replacing the missing vitamin. That's about as good a cure as you're going to get. The disease can reoccur if you run out of the vitamin so if you define cure as treating a disease so that it cannot ever come back, well, then the only disease we can really cure is life itself.
So her examples are quite spot on.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The good news: the mistake was made by the summary author and does not appear in TFA.
it really is; glad they're around, but you ever notice they never have a cure? Not even if it was half a mil for a one-time cure; their business is repeat customers with literally life-long lock-in.
Big Pharma: drug dealers in every sense of the phrase.
It starts with cystic fibrosis and ends with a tendency to vote for whatever party is in the minority at the time they mandate yet another test. You can't keep on weeding out "unwanted" genes from the gene pool, because sooner or later, the decision what genes are unwanted will be used to create an "Uebermensch".
It may be desirable to get yourself tested genetically if you want to have some insurance your child doesn't suffer from genetic disease. However, once you provide these services, it will be hard to get insurance, a job and what not if you or your parents don't use them. Even if they are legally not enforced, capitalism will enforce them anyhow. Discrimination of certain genes will make a paria out of probably over 50% of people, making it (practically) illegal for them to breed, making it harder to get loans, insurances and certain jobs. The USA economy has enough parias as it is, please don't make it worse by adding gene testing as a discriminator.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Human beings do not have cell walls. Cell walls are made of cellulose or chitin,and are typical of bacteria,fungi and plants. Human beings have cell membranes. Otherwise,a good informative summary.
If by "now" you mean in the year 2014, you might have a point.
Indeed, this assumption may already be included in their stated list price. "We know that if 100% of the people who need it could afford it, we would have to charge x to recoup costs and make our desired profit margin. Since we'll be subsidizing y% of users, we will need to actually charge z% of x (where z is greater that 100)."
I've got karma to burn so I'm going to ask this here.
The summary refers to the company planning on "developing another drug to try and address that problem." While I understand that most language, and particularly English, is ultimately defined by usage rather than by formal standards, as someone for whom English is not his first language, I find myself flabbergasted by the "try and" idiom. I can understand "try to" as it makes logical sense; I don't see, however, the logic behind "try and" as it implies two different activities, trying, and actually doing. That seems semantically inconsistent, I'd even say gratingly incongruous (to me at least, perhaps because I did not learn English as a child). I also doubt it's what the idiom is semantically implying anyhow. So, can a kind reader explain the logic behind "try and" replacing "try to" in most usage?
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I could point out that California isn't bankrupt because of healthcare costs. I could do a whole excrutiatingly exhaustive review of just why California's revenues got strangled. I won't, because it won't matter to you.
Since you're doing your thinking emotionally -- the shrinks nickame it the "Just World Hypothesis" -- let me see if I can counterbalance the fear you're suffering from by adding a different one.
If a civilization has any obligations -- any at all -- then caring for the vulerable is the first among them. Any system that can't -- or won't -- care for the very young, the very old and the physically infirm doesn't deserve to continue. I know Sparta sounds cool, but I'm kinda glad a people who threw babies against rocks and committed murder for sport aren't around any more. In fact, I would argue that their brutality is precisely WHY they're not around any more. People who are working together tend to weather crises far better than a group of jackasses standing around screaming "Only the Strong Survive!" Teamwork, you know? Maybe your coach mentioned it? Remember John Wayne screaming back, "That's WHAT I got?" No? OK. didn't think so.
I'm old enough now to have watched a few of my friends and some of my family die. Heart disease is bad. Diabetes is worse. Cancer is flat-out evil. Real "We had to pick up a knife to save you" surgery is damn near the same thing as surviving a stabbing. I know, I know, those are just words to you. Let me put it in terms you may understand. You'd much rather be eaten by a vampire than succumb to cancer. You'd prefer any videgame death to what most fatal diseases have in store for you.
Here's where I'm going to pull back my hood and tap you on the shoulder with a long, bony finger. Eat a perfect diet. Exercise all you want. Revel in whatever gifts youth and good health can provide. I'll still be waiting. I got Steve Jobs. I got Feynman. I got Newton. You think I'm going to miss you? At 35, you'll notice you've lost a step. At 45, you and your doctor will have a little chat. At 55, those chats become discussions. At 65, you begin long talks about the options you have remaining.
Believe me when I say they'll dwindle.
And this is the best possible outcome, assuming some little patch of slippery ice has't gotten you first.
So while you're sitting there blithely saying we should kick the sick and the weak to the curb, I'm smiling. Because I know you'll be among them soon enough.
And people like you always whine the loudest when I come.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
So they need $1.176 billion per year to recover the development costs?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The average cost to market for a new drug is now $1.4b (using the aggregate of all developments method) and 7 years from patent to commercially viable drug. This gives them 3/4 years to recoup their original investment so, as you mentioned, having such a small user group has a massive impact on price point.
Clearly letting someone die when there's a drug that can save them is inhumane. But even with a public system there comes a point where a certain treatment is just too expensive.
If we're talking about "humane", perhaps we should look at overall outcomes. What makes more sense...$300K/yr to keep one person alive, or put the money into education and prevention and possibly save multiple lives?
To be candid, I am not an inhumane person, but at the same time, we spend a massive amount of money keeping people alive when natural selection says they shouldn't be.
However, if we are going to do it, we need to make it as reasonable as possible and the current medical system is not doing that.
We spend ~$30billion a year on research in the U.S. on the NIH, so a partial solution is already in place.
The other thing to keep in mind is this drug is only highly priced for the next 20 years. After that the generic versions will be cheap, so future patients will benefit hugely. That's the beauty of the patent system. It hasn't been outrageously extended to hell like the copyright system has.
It's worth pointing out that part of the calculus that goes into pricing a drug has to do with the fact that drugs rarely enjoy all 20 years of patent protection, due to the fact that the invention of the drug usually occurs in the R&D phase which predates the clinical trials, approvals, and manufacturing scale-up. The average effective patent life (i.e. the period during which a drug is actually for sale) is 7 to 12 years, so prices tweaked to compensate. The flip side is that it really discourages treatments for diseases that affect very small portions of the population,since you cannot count on recouping costs over long periods of time to compensate for the small patient pool. This is partially addressed by the Orphan Drug Act, but more often than not this is where charities funding disease-specific research really play a crucial role.
Technically the cure for malnourishment conditions also ends up being a lifelong treatment. You just can't win.
I read the internet for the articles.
Any info as to just how the price of this goodie was set? Is it really 1e4 times as expensive to produce as , say, Valium?
Am I excessively cynical to think the price was set as high as they thought they could convince insurance companies to pony up?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I have heard of egregious prices for complex new drugs before. I had a roommate who received a tumor-necrosis-factor inhibiting drug for free, that cost thousands of dollars a month. I Do Not want to be inflammatory, nor to impugn the reputation of a hard-working company that sounds very nice and ethical, but I have been wondering about this huge-price+free-for-low-income bracket for a while now, and I have a question: Do the companies that offer these coupons get a tax write-off for the price of the medication they give away?
Not unless you've lived and worked on four different continents. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Of course, because clearly money is the end-all, be-all of existence.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Well, at least it made an impact on one of your organs. :-)
Choices will be made.
Absolutely. And when we quit paying for billionaire tax cuts by skipping out on grandma's blood pressure medication, I'll be more amenable to hearing about them. Laffer and Stockman have both publicly recanted, and Buffet's with me on this one.
To expect a huge government organ could handle it without turning into a pit of corruption and graft is beyond delusional.
Yeah, because clearly the United States military has never accomplished anything of value. You're making a sophomore's argument for anarchy. Any government large enough to be effective is too large to work.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Too bad that life will be one of poverty
Really, you consider making $149,999.00 a year to be living at the poverty level? It's not really clear how you're approaching this. Not everyone who makes six figures consider themselves to be poor.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
So, 20 mil * 20 failed drugs / 1200 means they need to recover a total of 300000 per person this one treats to break even. That leaves 11 years of pure gravy at a minimum. Meanwhile, they'll be building a thicket of patents around every possible way to actually produce the patented drug to get themselves an extra 20 years.
Unless you're insured. If you are insured or make 150,001/year you'll be in poverty.
OK, you're arguing that we need to do some form of triage because we don't have resources to go around.
I don't believe this is true. When Merck Pharmaceutical tells you it's going to cost tens of millions, you should think of that in the same way you hear cops talk about the street value of the drugs they've seized. It's a self-serving, nonsense number. The same companies that scream "It's horribly expensive to make!" scream "It's not fair to make us compete against the government!" when we threaten to make it for ourselves. Since this is Slashdot, compare the situation to when various municipalities have tried to set up their own ISP. The same telcos that scream they have to charge billions to serve a city suddenly begin screaming that it's not fair for us to find alternatives. I promise you, we'll find we can manufacture this drug for a sliver of what the drug company is claiming.
BUT, BUT, BUT RESEARCH COSTS! I hear you scream. In case you haven't been paying attention, research in this country is done with recycled tax dollars. We The People have already paid the research costs, and if Merck and GalaxoSmithKline want to argue that, then all they have to do is stop taking Federal dollars.
They won't, of course.
Secondly, you're arguing that it's immoral to take money by force from one person to pay for something for another.
You know, I kind of like this argument. I'd love to make sure not one more penny of mine went to finance Gitmo. But, OK, Death and Taxes. We set up governments, and we pay for them by taxes of some kind. You actually are free to opt out of paying these taxes if you wish. If you don't feel like paying taxes any more, all you have to do is leave, and then tell a representative of the US government that you are no longer interested in being part of the United States. It's easy. Of course, you'll find very shortly that it's cheaper to pay taxes than it is not to pay taxes, but maybe to can join all the other John Galts on that floating ocean platform they're trying to build -- you know the one that's not going to have any building codes, the one we're going to nickname "Rapture" when it finds the bottom of the ocean.
Finally, you're arguing we can't fix everything. Maybe not.
But we can fix orders of magnitude more than we currently are.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Laffer has been proven correct thus far
Yeah, except that not even Laffer agrees with that any more. He's been backpedaling furiously from a bad theory made 30 years ago that's been empirically, wondrously disproven over the past ten. Abondoning his little napkin sketch was the only way he could retain a shred of academic credibility.
You simply cannot provide everyone with all the healthcare they want
Sure, sure, sure, just answer me this.
Why do we give federal subsidies to Harvard Medical School?
Because they threaten to train more doctors if we don't. We grant them a federal subsidy to restrict admission because the American Medical Association says that too many doctors in the field will lead to a lower standard of living for doctors.
And it's not just Harvard. Every medical school is granted subsidies to restrict enrollment.
Hmm. Seems odd, doesn't it? We can't find enough resources to meet America's medical needs in much the same way that companies can't find enough American engineers to fill all the jobs.
But let's assume those nonsense numbers are true. Let's try this. How about we divert all of the resources from the current War on Drugs and War on Terrorism and redirect those trillions of dollars to a War on Illness? Surely we can agree that a few more Harvard-educated medical doctors would do more good then a few thousand more TSA agents.
How about we find all the kids bright enough to become doctors and sponsor them through medical school? How about we devote research dollars to more than just making sure rich guys can screw their trophy wives?
How about we agree with all the drugs companies that government is wasteful and inefficient, and that we welcome their competition when we start opening drug factories they same way we open utility companies. How about when they start whining about horrendous research costs, we tell them we couldn't agree more, which is why we're going to ask them to pay back all the money we gifted to them over the past six decades.
How about we take Manhattan and Apollo project resources for the next 20 years and apply them to healthcare? Then let's see if your nonsense about "We can't afford to take care of our own" falls apart into the same pile of bull that the Laffer Curve and Supply-Side economics did.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
"Enlightened self interest" is one of the best jokes I've ever heard.
That, and since this is Slashdot after all, the basis of Sith philosophy...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
$12,000,000 is a lot less than $802,000,000.
"His name was James Damore."
But I'm afraid Team Reaper's been making a bit of a rally of late.
The advances you cite:
washing hands before surgery -- Joseph Lister, 1867
vaccinations -- Edward Jenner, 1796
antibiotics -- Alexander Fleming, 1928
Are from a while back, and I've had time to rally.
The US the highest infant mortality of any civilized nation. Fewer babies die in Croatia than the US. Tuberculosis is once again a major concern in American cities. Drug-resistant strains are becoming a real problem, and the doctors in charge are screaming panicky warnings that we may be approaching the end of the Age of Antibiotics. Life expectancies in the US are actually declining, mostly due to heart disease, diabetes and cancer from the industrialized crap we call food. We're eating beef rinsed in ammonia, product that is literally called "pink slime."
Sarah Palin and Megyn Kelly are actually convincing most Americans that healthcare is a frivolous luxury. I love those two!
Sad to say, Mortality Inc. looks like an "BUY" for the forseeable future.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
A quarter million plus a year for the drug.
We used to federally fund a lot of such research. Now it's done primarily for profit by corporations. So now it costs a quarter million a year per patient for a CF cure for quite a few people.
At some point even the libertarians have to notice that the actual free market means death for most people when so much research is necessary to discover treatments. The profit necessary to support the private research is too high for most to partake of the benefits.
This is what taxes are for. Go back to the public model, and fund the universities again with copious research grants - and freely distribute the results. Use companies to manufacture and distribute the drugs, no more.
The Age of Reason came about because knowledge was shared freely, and patrons granted money to scientists to discover. This in-house profit-only model is stifling us.
I would say that priority no 1 for a civilization is to make sure people don't just go around killing and looting randomly
And who do you think gets killed and stolen from? The strong? Conan the Barbarian doesn't need a strong police presence.
care about the economy enough that at least a majority wont have to starve
Again, who's in danger of starving? Oh, that's right, Oliver Twist and his little buddies.
When the state is there education and some basic negative rights are in order
And as Oliver Wendall Holmes observed more than once, the people who most need their rights are the people least able to assert them on their own.
So, we shouldn't be worried about caring for the weak, until we've finished caring for the weak? OK, got it.
The reason this upsets me is because of the crusades your likes want to go on in other countries.
OK, "my likes" are ice cream and romantic evenings. If you mean "the likes of me" because I'm arguing we should aid and defend the poor and sick, then I stand in such good company that I blush to be seen with them.
And "other countries?" You mean like Japan, Canada and Sweden? Please, by all means, send me to some more of those hellscapes.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I have cystic fibrosis. I'm 34 years old, and am in pretty good health: I can't see why I don't have at least 20 years left. That's the result of great new drugs coming out.
I'm sorta excited about this med, but it actually doesn't impact me. Why? I, like most CF patients, have the most common genetic variation in both alleles - delta F-508. This new medicine doesn't treat this variation (though the manufacturer actually has a variation of this drug that does treat delta F-508, and it's in the pipeline)
Cost? Yeah, it kinda freaks me out. However, CF is a small enough market that manufacturers typically subsidize treatment, for goodwill benefits. My current batch of meds - the ones I take when I'm healthy and doing good - probably costs over $100K retail. Even when I didn't have insurance, I never went without.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
I have CF. None of the meds I need I've ever done without, even when I had no insurance. Granted, they aren't quite as expensive as Kalydeco, but we're talking over $100K a year in meds. The pharmas tend to see to it that specialized drugs for small markets get to the patients: consider it a loss leader to benefit public perception and stock price.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
From a radio report, apparently they will also provide it free for uninsured people who earn less than $150k, so they'll be treating more than they'll be getting paid for.
So if you earn $151,000/yr you're expected to pay for a medicine that costs almost twice your entire yearly income? Okaaay....
Do I remember the Reagan years? You mean Alexander "I'm in Charge" Haig and James "The Environment Doesn't Matter Because of the Rapture" Watt? You mean Ronald "We're Launching the Missies in Five Minutes" Reagan, the guy who once raised taxes on the rich?
Reaganomics worked great at inflating the debt and increasing poverty. Morning in America turned out to be overcast and hazy. You can draw a straight line from that infernal speech, go through the point at Gordon Gecko's "Greed is Good" speech, and draw it right through the ruins of New Orleans and Detroit. You can look at the other side and continue the line back through Nixon and Watergate and back through Eisenhower's farewell address, where he tried to warn us about this.
The only thing sadder than the Right's attempt at revisionist history and canonizing Reagan was their attempt to whitewash Nixon.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Because without it, those of us with insurance pay for the care of those without. In this case, the uninsured pay none of the costs for this drug, increasing the price paid by those who are insured.
paintball
No. Early civilization was exactly the opposite, and has been for almost all of history (and still was in many places, as of this morning). Brutal feudalism, slavery at every turn, war for turf and routine, horrible death of the weak and unprepared. Civilization is great!
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You're right. The company shoud be shut down and nationalized, just like all businesses.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Excellent, I'll draw up the forms!
More seriously, while the amount of profit is outrageous and may need to be kept to a more reasonable level, we must acknowledge that they do have a significant investment and need to be compensated. I notice that other western nations manage not to let healthcare bankrupt their citizens and they havent had to resort to nationalizing pharmaceutical companies.
My question is how many people with a salary of approximately $150k do not have health insurance?
Does God treat us as servants or friends? Check my homepage.
Oh, I absolutely agree with you there.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
...more and more lucrative "vanity" drugs, and fewer and fewer drugs for anything else.
Funny how that works out.
Come talk to me when the parents of autism and other children's diseases aren't being forced to hold bake sales for even the most cursory of research.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
It's actually surprising how little time these companies get to sell their drugs exclusively. Not that it's a bad thing, mind you, just surprising. Probably has to do with Congress not wanting to prevent themselves from having access to cheap, generic versions of these new life-saving drugs.
You know what's hilarious? We spend $700 billion/year on the "defense" budget vs. $30 billion/year on the NIH. I find that hilarious. All these stupid diseases could be cured in 15 years if we reversed those numbers.
I sincerely hope this drug gives you the opportunity to live a normal, 100 frickin' year long life- without going bankrupt.
And if you made all of those discoveries available patent-free, nobody will will want to attack you. You're providing $700 billion a year in free medical research. Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
Of course it means you can't muck about in the afairs of other countries. That's no fun. Stupid idea...
My question is how many people with a salary of approximately $150k do not have health insurance?
Doesn't this only exemplify how very fucked up the entire healthcare system in this country is? Insurance isn't something you should have to have to be able to afford medical treatments, because everyone is not guaranteed to be able to get insurance to begin with. I don't believe any insurance companies would jump at the chance to sign up a new customer with a pre-existing CF diagnosis. Medical care should be at prices people can half-way afford without insurance. Otherwise all you really have is medical providers milking insurance companies for every dollar they can (raising premiums for everyone, healthy or not) and the uninsured are just SOL.
You got my vote.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Even if they did, does any health insurance actually cover pre-existing chronic conditions like cystic fibrosis, especially when the medication for them costs $300,000 a year?
It will be no consolation to discover that it's too late for him anyway. The secondary damage from CF related illnesses is what kills you ; this treatment would help to prevent that from accumulating, which is one of the reasons it's such a potential moneyspinner - not only does it cost so much, it improves the prospect of the treatment being necessary for an extended period, and it's best applied to children - and who doesn't think of them?
If you're against coercion
You can't run a government without some obligations being placed upon the people who are governed. That's what voting, and constitutional checks and balances are for - to make sure that it's reasonable. What I'm against is it being unreasonable. For example, half the poeple in this country aren't asked to pay any income taxes. But they have the same power, in elections, as the people that they vote into the position of having to do the paying for them. That sort of inequity is slavery. That you'd rather shut up people who point things like that out says a lot about your position on the matter, master.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You know what's hilarious? We spend $700 billion/year on the "defense" budget vs. $30 billion/year on the NIH. I find that hilarious. All these stupid diseases could be cured in 15 years if we reversed those numbers.
Agreed. If it's any consolation, the NIH itself is the only government agency I can think of that is uniformly filled with the most frikkin brilliant researchers in the entire field and then some, better than you'll find in even the most highly-compensated strata of the private sector. NASA is just a shell of it's former self, the DOE is a cold-war dinosaur, the great industrial blue-sky labs are all gone or completely unrecognizable (Bell Labs, Kodak, GE, etc). Meanwhile, public universities are cutting "frills" like entire humanities departments due to budget cuts, while private universities are slowly morphing into elite boarding schools catering exclusively to the ultra-wealthy. Sure, they do alot of good research too, but only if someone else pays the bills for it like the NIH or NSF or a frikkin charity, but they still want YOU to donate to them because they argue they are almost like a charity. I mean, how are the 1%'s progeny supposed to *study* if they don't have 24 hour gourmet cooking and multimillion dollar fitness centers like they did in the upper east side?
The pharma industry has all but admitted that their entire economic model is broken, there will be no more blockbusters to make up for their research misses and they aren't agile enough to do the risky legwork to find the new drug candidates that require yet-undeveloped technology to even identify. Meanwhile, small startups basically stand no chance against the big guys unless they plan on being acquired first, at which point whatever risk-taking culture they had cultivated becomes superfluous. So if you hear oneday in the future that the NIH has become a dismal, depressing place to work full of do-nothings waiting to collect their federal pension, then we're all pretty screwed, it's the only part of the biomedical R&D ecosystem that is working the way it should.
I'm sure that President Obama will be glad to know that the idea of waste, fraud and abuse in government-paid healthcare systems is a straw man.
I'm sure that the Catholic Church will be glad to know that mandatory insurance for all kinds of things, including obvious consequences of life choices, is a slippery slope that nobody will really go down.
And that is an abomination.
We as a society decide we need fighter pilots, so we spend millions on their education. We decide we need law enforcement of every stripe, so we pay for thier training. We do this because, the argument goes, they contribute to public safety.
I would argue that the average cop and soldier saves fewer lives in their career than an ER doc does in a week. If we're willing to field armies of men with uniforms and guns to preserve life, why are we not willing to do the same for men with stethescopes and lab coats, when Hippocrates gives us such a better bang for our buck than Leonidas does?
When you are a physician holding actual lives in your hands, I think it's insane that we make you consider mundane bookkeeping while you're doing it. Anyone willing to wade into a storm of blood, screams and excrement to try to pull a life out of it shouldn't have to spend a minute of their lives thinking about how to pay their bills. The second you're willing to saw a human head in half in Gross Anatomy, OK, you're good. You've met your end of the social contract. We should take excellent care of you.
I don't think for one second you're overpaid. I think you're overworked, getting molested by insurance companies and undervalued. I want to get you help and support.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."