There is a development in the pricing of pharmaceuticals that will have enormous impact on the price of insurance. It will also have a massive effect on the prices insurance companies pay for our prescribed medicines if we are lucky enough to have health insurance that covers them. The development is in the headline, here: “Drug Companies Increasingly Pushed to Explain High Prices,” by Andrew Pollack, p. B1, col. 1 (New York Times Nat’l ed., “Business Day” Section, Thursday, July 23, 2015).
First, here are the prices charged by pharmaceutical companies for three examples, and the illnesses the drugs in these examples are prescribed to treat:
- Kalydecon, Three Hundred Thousand Dollars a year ($300,000.00/year), prescribed in the treatment of cystic fibrosis;
- Revlimid, One Hundred-Fifty Thousand Dollars per year ($150,000.00/year), prescribed for cancer; and our third example,
- Various drugs prescribed to treat multiple sclerosis, which are reported in the article to draw about $10,000.00 per year in the late 1990s and “more than $60,000 now”.
The pharmaceutical companies deny that they are charging what they can get away with. They justify these eye-popping prices by claiming that the high prices pay for research and development, but when demands are made to see the costs of research and development, the pharmaceutical companies reply that the costs of research and development are basically irrelevant. The pharmaceutical companies are apparently oblivious to the fact that the prices they charge and the reasons they give for their high prices are so obviously distorted that they all but demand questions.
The pharmaceutical companies may have a right to charge high prices, if we let them, but they have no right to call their gouging good for us.
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