blackenedbutterfly:

jonathan-cunningham:

A drug for high-risk pregnant women has cost about $10 to $20 per injection. Next week, the price of the progesterone shot, which is administered weekly, will be $1,500 a dose. The drug known as Makena has been made cheaply for years, mixed at pharmacies that do custom-compound treatments. But recently, KV Pharmaceutical of suburban St. Louis won government approval to sell the drug exclusively. Many obstetricians supported the switch for the sake of consistent quality. But no one anticipated the dramatic price hike, especially since the cost for development was shouldered by others in the past. ‘That’s a huge increase for something that can’t be costing them that much to make. For crying out loud, this is about making money,’ said Dr. Roger Snow at Massachusetts’ Medicaid program. ‘I’ve never seen anything as outrageous as this,’ said Dr. Arnold Cohen, an obstetrician at Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. This is obscene. KV Pharmaceutical will happily sit by collecting money from wealthy pregnant women while preterm births kill the infants of the poor.

this is what your capitalist health care ‘system’ looks like

drugs! just not for anybody who’s not upper-class

My Take:

Is this for real? What I don’t get it is how the pharma company is getting away with this. When they were approved for the monopoly, does anyone really believe the government had no idea that they were gonna raise the cost that much. According to this article, the burden of research and development had fallen on others in the past, so the company can’t even use the R&D excuse in this situation.

This is an example of capitalistic healthcare at its best. Pharmaceutical capitalism works really well if the drug is used preemptively in order to stop a disease from occurring. The problem is when someone does have a disease, pharma has no simple cure. It is always long term treatment. That’s because in order for them to pay for the R&D and make money, they have no other way. You can’t really blame them for attempting to make money. The system we have in place encourages that.

Is the answer the gov't subsidized R&D? That may help control cost, but it will never happen unless we are willing to pay more taxes, which will never be accepted. It is not even part of the discussion anymore. Until we are willing to do a major overhaul and bring real “change” to Washington, nobody should be surprised by these type of stories.