The NYT ran a Reuters piece on the future of drug pricing. Guess what? No one is talking about good old-fashioned free market prices. The word from Reuters is that in the future drug companies will be paid based on the benefits provided by their drugs, not a per pill charge. As described in the piece, drug companies would be compensated by insurers for the use of their drugs based on the average improvement in health per patient treated.

As the piece hints, this will be an incredible burden to calculate, especially for drugs that are used on limited numbers of patients who may also suffer from multiple conditions. The situation gets even more complicated when we take into account the possibility that a drug could have serious side-effects that won’t be discovered until many years after it is in use. I suppose in that situation we go back and collect the payments that were made to the company earlier from the shareholders and their children.

For some reason, the idea of just funding the research upfront and putting in the public domain seems to be out of bounds. Reuters, and implicitly the NYT, would apparently prefer all sorts of bizarre bureaucratic fixes rather than something that would almost certainly be far simpler and cheaper and not leave sick people struggling to find ways to pay for drugs that are necessary for their life or health.