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1000$? It costs 80$ here. Insurance covers the 1mg injection completely. Drug prices on the US market are inflated as hell. Also it can be made for 5 bucks but the decades of research and billions poured into said research and testing is what raises the price.
Regardless corporate greed is corporate greed and big pharma is into some really shady stuff. Especially when we get to biologicals.
The thing that drives prices up is greed and marketing.
There is a good chunk of funding for medications that gets federal grant money.
It costs a 1000. Government programs make it 80. And that’s good.
Our insurance system IS the government program. The government negotiates prices with the manufacturer. This is also the reason we have drug shortages. Cheaper drugs get re-exported legally by third parties to countries with higher prices. Abbvie straight up made a system where their new drugs would be delivered personally to the individual patient via a personal code to circumvent what happened to Humira.
Tresiba, Insulatard, Actrapid and a couple of other insulins, as well as antibiotics like Augmentin (which is in short supply to begin with) also suffered from re-export until the government issued a temporary ban.
The wholesale companies’ response? Stockpile and wait for the ban to expire.
Yeah I’m aware. I’m just saying, someone is paying the bill
They always “face pressure” when they get anywhere near an actually free market.
I’ve heard about shortages of the drug. Does anybody know how hard it actually is to make or if they’re manufacturing scarcity as well?
According to the article they’re spending $17 billion to increase production.
Engineered Biologics involve having to make special cell cultures off engineered specimens so it’s a research forward cost. The actual production is cheap once the cultures are made.
I think if you look deep enough you’ll find public funding in a lot of these projects like with Humira, which was funded by the UK Government and is now absurdly expensive as fuck
It’s a pretty simple peptide, there’s multiple companies in China that make grey market versions.
The scarcity seems to come from the government enforced monopoly, only a single company is officially allowed to make it and they don’t have enough machines, I imagine getting more machines takes time.
Governments could issue compulsory licences for shortages like this, but they never do.
Biologics are not complex to make once you get the cells farting out the medicine