Drug prices are exceedingly high in the squo.
Angelis et al 23 [Aris; assistance professor in health economics; Roman Polyakov; student who aided in the project; Oliver J. Wouters; assistant professor of health policy; Els Torreele; visiting policy fellow; Martin McKee, professor of European public health; BMJ; “High drug prices are not justified by industry’s spending on research and development”; https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj-2022-071710]//kaviWaRu
Concerns over the prices of new medicines have been growing over the past decade. In the US, estimated net prices of newly launched prescription drugs increased from a median of around $1400 a year (£1200; €1300) in 2008 to over $150 000 a year in 2021.1 Onasemnogene abeparvovec (Zolgensma), a gene therapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2019 for spinal muscular atrophy, was at the time of approval the most expensive drug ever, with a price of over $2m for a single dose treatment.2 Several more recent drugs for rare diseases are priced even higher,3 with a gene therapy for haemophilia B approved by the FDA in November 2022 costing $3.5m per dose.4 But even old and common drugs have seen inexplicable price increases: in the US, the list price of some insulin products increased more than twofold from 2007 to 2018,5 while a US government report identified 1216 products that had seen prices rise above inflation between July 2021 and July 2022, with an average increase of 31.6%.6