How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

Is it though?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

- the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population.

India is 33/100k. We've got 20 times more of our own American citizens behind bars than the typical 3rd wordl country.

This not to mention all the extra capital needed to fund research into all of the drugs that never make it to market before a company finds something that works.

As in: the idea behind capitalism (the reason we put up with it) is not that price-gouging is some fundamental right we should worship, but because capitalism works. What's that mean? It efficiently allocates resources. How does it efficiently allocate resources? By letting a fluid market with many competing buyers and sellers figure out an appropriate price.

Notably, patents of life-sustaining medicines utterly destroy that cornerstone of capitalism. People can and will pay almost anything to get that drug, so the seller can charge what it wants - that's not capitalism as it's supposed to work, that's a hostage scenario.

I don't know what the best alternative is, but I'm convinced that there are many trivially better solutions to allocating resources to medical research, efficacy testing and production than what we're doing now. Every social network, things like google's pagerank, scientific journal impact ratings - all represent alternative means to determine worth in a competitive fashion; and even competition isn't strictly necessary - for some scenarios plain old raw computation to solve for the optimal solution may be possible nowadays. We're not even trying to improve the status quo.

If they are charging this amount of money, it is because someone, somewhere, in some deep and mischievous and evil place inside those big pharma buildings, has crunched a lot of numbers and figured out this is the "correct" price for them to charge for this drug. That is their income-maximizing price. And THAT is what's insane.

Blaming them for "greed" is idiotic. But you have to scratch your head and think of how on Earth the best strategy for them is to sell a product with a price tag that no individual could really afford!!! That's the real mystery, and when you start asking THAT question, perhaps you end up realizing that the answer isn't so clear.

For starters, maybe ingenious strategy devised by our hero in the article, and the Indian government's positions in generic were foreseen by one of the thousands and thousands... upon thousands of lawyers, and business experts, and consultants that these companies hire, so they quickly realized that the name of the game HAS to be that they need to squeeze everything they can out of the U.S. market to make up for the hits everywhere else.

"But wait, no one will be able to afford the drug," exclaimed one novice executive at the pharmaceutical. "Not to worry," the senior counsel said, "we have medicaid in the U.S., and that's where most of our customers will come from. You see, the government will effectively be our client, and since they won't have an option not to offer this treatment, all we need to do is ensure we have amazing terms with this ONE customer and we'll be aaaaaaalllll set." Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Don't blame the pharma companies. We have ZERO competition in many dimensions of healthcare. We have a drug approval process that costs billions of dollars for a single drug to get through, and the academic evidence is quite clear that it is actually killing more people than it is purportedly saving. I had back surgery three years ago, and a line item in my medical bill was "juice - $25." I stayed in the hospital for 19 hours. It cost me $40,000 FOR NO GOOD REASON whatsoever. I also had shoulder surgery overseas, with a Harvard medical-school trained doctor who operates on world class professional soccer players. I was in a phenomenal hospital for two days, in a private room, with nurses checking on me every hour, the works. The sticker price? $7,000. Without a penny of gov't subsidy.

Big Pharma isn't the issue. Our policies towards healthcare are crippling us to no end.