Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it.
“Normally you have a virus, and your body fights it off or your body fights it to a standstill and you just have it forever, basically, and hope it remains dormant more or less,” Laufer said. “The holy grail for every virologist is to find a way to drain the viral reservoir, and Sovaldi does this. You take one pill of Sovaldi a day for 12 weeks and then you don’t have hepatitis C anymore.”
The problem is that those pills are under patent, and they cost $1,000 per pill.
“Literally, if you have $84,000 then hepatitis C is not your problem anymore,” Laufer said. “But given that there are other methodologies for managing hepatitis C that are not curing it and that are cheaper, insurance typically will not cover [Sovaldi]. And so we’ve got this incredible technology and it’s sitting on the shelf except for people who are ridiculously wealthy.”
So Four Thieves Vinegar Collective set out to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. Chemists at the collective thought the DIY version would cost about $300 for the entire course of medication, or about $3.57 per pill. But they were wrong.
“It’s actually just a little under $70 (83 cents per pill), which just kind of blew my mind when they finally showed me the results,” Laufer said. “I was like, can we do the math here again?”
So, the laws should be changed and every pharma exec, board members and so on who prices like this should be locked up for life.
Next, all laws need to be changed to end the doctrine that only profit maximization for shareholders matters.
Third, pharma needs to move a bounty system. According to WHO there are 58 million people with Hep C around the world. Put up a bounty of 1,000 times that: 58 billion, for a cure, minus the cost per cure. Research costs can also be added to the bounty, once the cure is certified, not before. A consortium of rich governments can create the bounty funds, with poorer countries allowed in for free. A UN org reporting only to the general assembly should probably administer it.
Fourth, end pharma patents. All of them. All information, including manufacturing information is shared.
Fifth: for all palliatives, profits must be capped at 5% max.
Sixth: move most research to government and non-profits. Real non-profits, none of the Chat-GPT nonsense.
Seventh: remove further monetary incentives to just research forever: everyone involved is capped at a salary of 2xmedian income in the G-20 or something similar. You want the big pay off? You have to actually cure the disease.
Eighth: Force scientists and technicians to be “in on the bounty.” Some sort of fairly even split between people who worked on the cure.
There are other actions which should be taken, but these are the basics. Right now we aren’t curing people we can, and companies prefer palliatives to cures because they can charge until the person dies. We need to emphasize cures and make sure no one gets rich selling palliatives.
In the meantime the right to make your own medicines needs to be 100% legal and supported.
mago
Greed driven cultures and institutions working contrary to basic goodness and common well being is staggering, almost incomprehensible, certainly reprehensible, but maybe I’m naive.
Tc
Nobody needs a lecture on how to fix this. They know, and dont care. The immorality sickness is the real sickness, not Hep C.
Cure the moral sickness and we’d have affordable health care that didnt exploit patients (and a world that didnt make them so sick to begin with)
But then again maybe the fact that our science/medicine and even food production treats animals and the planet itself as mere resources to be exploited has something to do with it . Not to mention the calculations of “acceptable” levels of poisons and carcinogens in our food air and water, where cost v benefit analysis is really sickness & death for masses v already obscene ceo wealth.
I know Ill get scolded for questioning the value of scientific experiments on animals, but you really cant expect a society to turn on and off its compassion and morality like that when it comes to sentient beings (our fellow creations who are as much a part of god as we are, if you believe in a creator, who could only have created out of itself). Rationalize torturing animals and its a slippery slope to the Jews and Nazis who consider all gentiles and untermenschen to be animals deserving death or slavery.
zoombats
I had the great fortune in 2013 of being cured of Hep C because I live in Ontario and had the entire bill of around $65,000 paid for by the Trillium Foundation. I say to my American friends that those are the perks of living in Commie, Pinko, Socialist Canada
Willy
We’re being conditioned to be personally responsible, to demand that everybody else be even more personally responsible than we have to, and that our wealthy elites are the most personally responsible of all because “Well duh they’re rich”.
Our dead elders who promoted the “there but for the grace of god goes I” meme have gotta be rolling in their graves about now. But a few Dems did reduce insulin costs, for some.
Roxan
Only $84,000? It’s a deal! Medicare paid $120, 000 for my Solvadi, in 2018. It was pretty new, at that time, and I was worried about side effects. I had none. Only 2 weeks into treatment, the worst of the symptoms stopped! I had been very ill, too. If your insurance won’t pay, you can buy it in India–it was $800 at that time. Vietnam supplies it for free to their citizens and I’m sure it’s much cheaper. This is a serious disease that also causes 5 kinds of cancer. Get tested and get well.
Kouros
The price reflects the cost of treating Hep-C with the classical approach, legthy treatments with interferon, hospitalization, etc.
I know Pharma companies in Canada kept asking for hospitalization data in order to get a glimps at costs, so they can tailor their pricing accordingly…
StewartM
For-profit healthcare is simply not fixable.
What you describe above is just an example of the general rule. For-profit health care:
a) over-treats those who can pay, sometimes this means unnecessary care;
b) under-treats those who can’t pay, or who can’t pay much.
Trying to fix this with government subsidies and such while keeping the for-profit system just means the profiteers will favor the most-expensive (i.e., most profitable) means of care.
By contrast, a purely government run system (where there is no profit) should mean:
a) everyone gets the same treatment
b) a cure like described here is now the least expensive treatment to the payer, the government, so would be favored over the continuing treatment option.
And yeah, you can issue a host of regulations and laws and decrees, but if you keep the for-profit system it’s a never-ending battle. The best system is where the motivations align with the desired outcome.
The only quibble with what you propose, is that I think we should have fully-staffed national labs to do the work, and who farm out smaller parts of projects it to universities. But that’s because I believe universities should focus on teaching, and that unpaid grad school labor is inexperienced and not that skilled. This returns to the problem of competency loss in the sciences in the West.