Imagine that you are gasping for breath, literally on the verge of death. Then someone injects you with a medicine and – miracle! – you are perfectly healthy again. Would you pay $300 for that injection? The treatment is epinephrine; your illness was a life-threatening allergy. And that $300 price? That reflects a six-fold increase…
I sometimes worry that my wife Paula won’t be able to see me grow old. Not that I expect to outlive her. She is four years my junior and has the blood pressure of a 17-year-old track star. It’s her eyesight I’m worried about, because she is at risk for a form of blindness called…
Greedy pharma execs have been in the news of late. Here is a story on the topic, from Wired. The reporter misquotes me. I never said Apple could make profits selling iPhones for $10. I said that even if they could profit at that price, they’d be crazy to do so if people would…
Hepatitis C has been in the news lately, because of amazing (and amazingly expensive) new treatments that promise to cure their life-threatening illness. While we ought to debate the expense of these treatments, we should also remind ourselves of how much we’ve been spending caring for patients with advanced disease. Here’s a picture showing the…