Big and little pharma

Like many people my age I use the last mouthful of my morning coffee to wash down pills for high blood pressure and cholesterol, while perched atop a stormy crag, lightning playing around my upthrust fist as I bellow “IMMORTALITY IS MINE!”.

Then scurry meekly off to work. The placebo effect alone is worth it, the patents have expired and the generic drug firms are now picking over the bones of the IP. Like tattslotto, you are buying daily hope.

Not so with the latest biologics treatment for the severe psoriasis with which I have shared my adult life. $60,000 per course but subsidised by the PBS. I have been eligible for about five years but I found the horror of gouging the hapless citizen more confronting than the actual skin disease. When I originally baulked and mentioned why, it caused some consternation at the Skin and Cancer Clinic, and people gathered, including a professor, to deal with this reluctance to bathe in this taxpayer largesse by state proxy.

“The Government pays because it is so expensive” he helpfully offered. I politely suggested that it is the other way round, but alas, he was a dermatologist and not an economist.