Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84k alternative
The latest episode of Econtalk "Vincent Rajkumar on the High Price of Cancer Drugs" is relevant to this subject: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/vincent_rajkuma.htm...It discusses structural issues relating to why drugs are so expensive (mainly in the US). Some of it's regulatory (e.g. Medicare not being allowed to negotiate drug prices), or there being no ceiling on prices related to efficacy as in many other countries.But some of it's because nobody in the system seems to have a real incentive to reduce costs, even when the benefits are worth it. E.g. an example that's mentioned is that doctors will usually describe the latest brand medicine that's outrageously expensive, instead of a generic that's cheap and statistically almost exactly the same thing when it comes to efficacy.