Approve it and tell Novartis - Fed.gov isn’t paying a penny.
I expect Novartis will still sell it, only without the obscene, crony-capitalist, deep-state profit margin
~3000 potential patients per year for a near miracle treatment that involves separating your freaking immune cells out, altering them and then breeding them and putting them back in and monitoring for negative aspects and efficacy and along with those costs trying to recoup some of the research expense for the previous 10 years and you think they’re making a killing on it???
You can front that argument for something like the Hep C drug because the affected population is large and in cases like that and the AIDS cocktail the foreign countries essentially say they’ll steal it if they don’t get it subsidized and the FEDS go along with it when they should be telling them “do that and we’ll pound you”, but the racket arguement doesn’t really apply here...yet.
I say yet because this is still cutting edge science that will probably end up leading to similar treatments down the road for far more common cancers, and if the cycle ends up repeating along the usual lines it can be bitched about then (unless we “fix” it before then).