According to a Senate report released in December, Gilead knew pricing Sovaldi at $75,000 per patient for a 12-month course would restrict patient access by 24% of US payers, and yet it still ended up seeking $84,000 for it. The company priced Harvoni at an even higher $94,500, such that last year barely 2% of the eligible [hepatitis C virus] patients in the US were treated with the drugs.
Sure, that’s much more than one-tenth of one percent.
Nonetheless. Get the picture? Only a small number of rich people get to be cured.
Gilead is so depraved that the Massachusetts Attorney General is stepping in (though she probably can’t do much about it). Yet the story hasn’t even gotten much press, because as Americans we’re so used to homicidal greed.
****************
Sanders owns this reality. He’s running with it. He’s running on it.
****************
The letter from the AG went out to Gilead CEO John Martin, a man who has brought his depravity to the board of trustees at the University of Chicago.
****************
The lovely larger picture.
****************
Never before has Norman Mailer’s immortal statement felt so true: The shits are killing us.
February 2nd, 2016 at 3:20PM
I think that a great moral statement could be made by many progressive writers, journalists, composers, and songwriters by cutting the length of copyright protections from the current age of the universe + 2x the age of the universe (only slightly exaggerating) to, let’s say, 10 years–half the length of the patents that drugs get.
February 3rd, 2016 at 9:48AM
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/02/02/npr-inside-turing-pharmaceuticals-martin-shkreli