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Blood Price
Jul. 21st, 2014 12:50 pmFrom Today's Boston Globe, an article about specialty drugs, emphasis mine:
["Specialty drugs transform lives — but at a cost," Felice J. Freyer, July 21, 2014]
My first thought is that what that boy's medication costs a month, I can live on for a year. But then it occurs to me that what I spend in a month is more than the average person in central Africa lives on for a year.
It is really hard to figure out the value of something that has infinite value. It seems to me when we try to put a price on life all we're doing is calculating what someone could pay for it.
(To reduce my cognitive dissonance, I'm thinking of the $30,000/mo as not being the literal cost of this drug for this boy, but what a particular insurance pool is spending on medical research. Which is pretty literally true.)
Fewer than 4 percent of patients use specialty drugs, but they account for 25 percent of total drug spending in the United States; and the growth of specialty drugs is a key factor driving up health care spending, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. . .
Diane Lima of Acushnet['s] 14-year-old son depends on a hemophilia treatment that costs $25,000 to $30,000 a month. Years ago the boy needed a wheelchair from time to time because of frequent bleeds into his muscles and joints. Now, thanks to injections every other day, her son can play sports at his high school, where hardly anyone even knows he has hemophilia.
["Specialty drugs transform lives — but at a cost," Felice J. Freyer, July 21, 2014]
My first thought is that what that boy's medication costs a month, I can live on for a year. But then it occurs to me that what I spend in a month is more than the average person in central Africa lives on for a year.
It is really hard to figure out the value of something that has infinite value. It seems to me when we try to put a price on life all we're doing is calculating what someone could pay for it.
(To reduce my cognitive dissonance, I'm thinking of the $30,000/mo as not being the literal cost of this drug for this boy, but what a particular insurance pool is spending on medical research. Which is pretty literally true.)
