damn straight...
Posted on 07/13/2017 9:53:58 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Norwegian hepatitis C patients are waiting longer than they should for medical treatment due in part to a monopoly on its supply, according to a report.
Between 15,000 and 20,000 Norwegians live with the chronic condition, which is treated with a 12-week course of medicine. The cost of a 12-week course of the Epclusa medicine in Norway is 540,000 kroner (€57,000), according to the Klassekampen newspaper.
American pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences owns a monopoly on supply of the medicine in the Scandinavian country, according to the report. […]
Ronny Bjørnestad, head of NGO Prolar, which works to improve understanding of the illness, told Klassekampen that he had decided to obtain the treatment by going abroad. “I felt I couldn’t wait any longer. I have a ticking bomb in my liver and am still infectious. I have a teenager in my house and it wouldn’t take any more than him accidentally using my razor blade for an accident to happen,” he told Klassekampen.
Bjørnestad said that he had purchased the same medicine for the equivalent of 7,500 kroner (€800) in Bangladesh, and then had it sent on to a friend in Scotland. …
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.no ...
If you go and read the news on a daily basis...the manipulation and shortage-gimmick is being used on a regular basis now (not just in Europe but in the US as well). All of these companies have figured out ways to make you pay the maximum possible price for a drug.
You can get on a plane and fly into Greece or Albania....to buy what you’d buy in the US for half (sometimes even a quarter) of what you’d typically pay.
It’s the capitalist system at work and they know that they have one-of-a-kind products. The state-care systems (again, it doesn’t matter if it’s in the US or Europe) are limiting what they will pay for particular drug....so you the consumer will have to dig out the cash needed to make up the difference.
“It’s the capitalist system at work”
There is no such thing as “the capitalist system.”
Read Hayek, “The Fatal Conceit.”
https://www.conservativebookclub.com/book/fatal-conceit-errors-socialism
“To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” …And that is exactly what has happened, and what will happen in the future for those who continue to pursue socialism.
Nice essay summarizing Hayek. Thanks for the link.
“While no one (with the possible exception of Ayn Rand’s followers) is calling for an extension of “extended order” ethics into the realm of the small group, there is an influential intellectual group, the socialists, calling for just the opposite: the reconquest of the West by “small group” ethics. Needless to say, Hayek looks upon this prospect unfavorably. Hayek, while admitting that such an event might initially satisfy our instincts, points out its long-range consequences: poverty, starvation, and widespread death. “Extended order” ethics, Hayek notes, are chiefly responsible for making possible our present level of population and economic well-being; their abandonment would lead to chaos and primitive tribalism, a tribalism which, lacking large-scale coordinating capabilities, would be unable to sustain Earth’s population.”
Meanwhile the 12-week drug course in the US, where it’s made, is $75,000. About $10,000 more than in Norway.
It costs 1 to 3 billion dollars (That's B, billion) to go through all the hoops that the FDA requires to approve a new drug in the US. The requirements include patenting the drug, so that anyone can make it after the patent runs out. Most of the patent time limit of 20 years is consumed by the approval process. That gives only a few years to recover the costs of the development and approval process.
The fewer people that need the drug, the higher the price must be to recover that cost. If those costs aren't borne by the consumer who needs the drugs, who then should pay them?
damn straight...
There are several competing companies that make Hep C cures. Suppose the national health head gets them all in the room, and says OK, guys, what’s the best you can do for me? Do you want the contract for Norway or not? Not surprisingly, he will hear much better prices than this.
These national health systems are supposed to lower costs by bargaining with providers, but here they have clearly failed to do so.
“Meanwhile the 12-week drug course in the US, where it’s made, is $75,000. About $10,000 more than in Norway.”
That’s because the government is the payer of last resort.
I did about 58 weeks of interferon and ribavirin. It was...oh, other than pleasant. I’d have paid a lot to get off with 12 weeks.
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