Re:Congressman calls for probe into Valeant’s pricing of lea...
by ceterum_censeo on Sunday October 23, 2016 @03:39PM
(#12775060)
> this smells a lot like apologetics.
That's hardly my intention here, and frankly, I find the accusation both insulting and offensive.
As with many (most?) pharmaceuticals, the cost of the active ingredient doesn't play a large role in the ultimate price. This is a prescription injectable with a volume of 200–300 units per year. It will need to be produced under GMP, and since the volume is minuscule, it's going to be produced using an expensive batch process. Setup/teardown, time, testing, packaging and logistics are going to dominate the per unit cost. It's really, really difficult to predict what the cost would be without more research, but somewhere between the original $950 and the current $27k wouldn't surprise me less than either extreme. (Keep in mind these aren't the ASP)
Portraying the entire pharmaceutical industry as one of comfortable monopolies based on the actions of some unlikeable bad actors isn't fair: the majority of the industry defines "cut throat".
That's hardly my intention here, and frankly, I find the accusation both insulting and offensive.
As with many (most?) pharmaceuticals, the cost of the active ingredient doesn't play a large role in the ultimate price. This is a prescription injectable with a volume of 200–300 units per year. It will need to be produced under GMP, and since the volume is minuscule, it's going to be produced using an expensive batch process. Setup/teardown, time, testing, packaging and logistics are going to dominate the per unit cost. It's really, really difficult to predict what the cost would be without more research, but somewhere between the original $950 and the current $27k wouldn't surprise me less than either extreme. (Keep in mind these aren't the ASP)
Portraying the entire pharmaceutical industry as one of comfortable monopolies based on the actions of some unlikeable bad actors isn't fair: the majority of the industry defines "cut throat".