1. Practically no one in the US who needs expensive chemotherapy drugs goes without them. Either the patient goes to a 340b hospital and the hospital treats for a lower or zero cost or the patient qualified for programs that the manufacturer runs where the drug is provided for free.
2. Compare the situation in the US to the UK where the gov't said "abiraterone" is not worth the price and patients couldn't get it at all, unless the paid out of the pocket for it.(1) Do you think that's a better situation than the US?
(1) The UK gov't body NICE just decided in May to approve the use of abiraterone because the company decided to offer a discount. The current cost is a little under 3000GBP/month.
I know it sounds harsh, but at that price point, I can understand that. Money is finite, and choices must be made. That £3000 a month could possibly be spent elsewhere with greater benefits for the health of the society.
Right, just like they charge a fraction of the price outside the USA vs pumping insurance for all it's worth in the USA.
After all, the cancer market is so small, only one third of the entire population has cancer at any given time, it might take them more than a year to start making net profit.
Please stop defending and apologizing for billionaires.
>Right, just like they charge a fraction of the price outside the USA vs pumping insurance for all it's worth in the USA.
This US is where they recover their development costs. People in poor countries just can't afford to pay what it costs to develop a drug, and the US has only so much influence when it comes to drug patents. Witness India's abrogation of patents on AIDS drugs. When you're Pfizer and Canada tells you "this is what we're willing to pay for your drug. If you don't don't like it we'll just invalidate your patent and give you nothing" you take what you can get.
>After all, the cancer market is so small, only one third of the entire population has cancer at any given time, it might take them more than a year to start making net profit.
A third of the population has cancer? Not even close. Cancer prevalence in the US is something like 12 million people,
out of a population of about 314 million, which works out to something less than a 4%.
And there is no "cancer market". Cancer is a class of diseases. This drug is specifically designed to treat prostate cancer (which is itself not one disease but a class of different types of cancers that start in the prostate) that has metastasized, which isn't even most prostate cancer patients. So no, this isn't Lipitor or the next big allergy medication. They're not going to sell this to very many people, and the people who take it are very sick, so most of them won't be taking it for very long.
>Please stop defending and apologizing for billionaires.
Name one person who made a billion dollars in legal pharmaceuticals. Hell, I wish people were making billions from drugs like this one instead of adding "time release" to drugs that have been on the market forever.
It certainly will be a lucrative, profit-making drug and the temptation will be high to milk it for all it's worth.