August 03, 2014
The NYT tells us the good news on the cost of giving people Sovaldi for treating Hepatitis C. First, the annual costs are likely to fall in the years ahead as the backlog of people with the disease are cured and the numbers needing treatment declines sharply. Second, new effective drugs will come on the market and compete with Sovaldi, driving the price down.
In a context where the government gives Savaldi a patent monopoly it is good to have multiple drugs that can provide competition. However from the standpoint of the efficiency of the drug development process this implies an enormous amount of waste.
Once an effective treatment for Hepatitis C has been developed, there is little medical benefit in having a second or third effective treatment. The resources to develop these alternatives to Sovaldi could have been much better utilized researching treatments for diseases which do not presently have a cure. However the incentives provided by the massive patent rents being earned by Gilead Sciences (the patent holder for Sovaldi) give a huge incentive to other companies to carry through duplicative research. If anyone cared about efficiency in the health care system this point would be widely publicized.
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