Commentary: Rate of pharma innovation on pace to eventually surpass ability to pay for it...drug pricing and budgeting problems will only get worse
Austin B. Frakt writing in JAMA: Even though US consumers spend 3 times more for hospital care than for medication, they are much angrier with pharmaceutical companies than hospitals for driving up the cost of health care. Drug companies raise this apparent inconsistency in an effort to defend their pricing practices. In so doing, however, they fail to appreciate why they’ve been targeted for so much opprobrium. Ironically, the industry’s biggest public relations problems may arise from its most effective and widely applicable innovations.
Financier, Producer, Physicist, Neuroscientist, Impresario, and Playwright.
8 年: An intriguing comment, Austin Frakt's: "A $1 million pill that extended life by 10 years would be considered cost-effective, but to provide it to every American would require an expenditure that is equivalent to more than 1000 years of US drug spending. "It would be both painful and difficult to deny such a pill to patients who could not afford it. But alternative methods of rationing are perhaps even less palatable. "Such are the financial, political, and cultural limits of our ability to manage spending for expensive, effective medicine."