How much should new drugs cost?
There are a lot of innovative therapies with encouraging prospects and eye-popping price tags in the news lately. All of them pose hard questions about the big commercial risks drug companies must take and the enormous pricing power of medicines that can help suffering patients.
Sovaldi, the new drug to treat hepatitis C, costs $1,000 per pill, or about $84,000 for a full treatment regimen. Novel cancer drugs, perhaps the leading edge of a whole new class of oncology therapies, are coming to America soon at a cost of about $150,000 a year for a single patient.
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