Every item comes with a cost. We asked the question: How much is life worth? What is the maximum you should pay for a life-saving medication?
What is the right price for a drug that can save 200-300 babies each year from debilitating illnesses or death? Is it possible for new technologies, particularly gene therapies, to be priced in a way that allows them to deliver on their promises?
Everything has a price: pieces of moon land, butterflies, and organs
The world is like a huge supermarket, with price tags for almost everything. An uncommon butterfly can be as high as a million dollars on eBay. A quarter acre of the Moon’s surface is available starting at $24.90 – though we discourage you from buying it. Your organs are also available for purchase.
You could potentially make $45 million if you could extract every organ and chemical from your body. Medical Transcription estimates that a human body will sell for an average of $550,000, with a few key parts driving up the cost.
Contrary to popular belief you cannot sell organs in the USA for transplantation. (Nor in any other developed country). Even though there was a loophole that did not prohibit the sale of organs and bodies for research purposes, the bad news is that the only person making money off their tissues is a broker for cadavers.
According to the widely used, although somewhat hard-to-find-credit-for figures, a heart is worth around $1 million in the US. Second place is the value of a heart, which is worth approximately $557,000. Kidneys are about $262,000 each. Human skin ($10/inch), stomach (500) and eyeballs (1,500 each) are just a few of the other items.
Organs can be bought for less on black markets, but it is hard to know exactly where they came from. Although the black market for organs may not be transparent, it has been repeatedly reported that organ donors in developing nations – who most often sell body parts to their families – won’t see any similar sums. What they do get is probably a thousand dollars, or perhaps two. We should also note that every year, transplantation tourism creates thousands or even tens of millions of victims donors all over the globe.
The black market for organs continues to thrive. Until technology, e.g. 3D bioprinting is not a viable option for organ donation. There are simply too many people waiting to be able to donate their organs.
This article was one of The Medical Futurist’s most popular, and the team has received a few offers each week about organs for purchase. We want to emphasize that we have never been involved in organ sales and will not be. We believe in the organ donation systems of all countries. All countries face organ shortages, and waiting lists for transplantation are long. If we are unfortunate enough to die, we can declare our willingness as donors and save 8 lives.
However, any black market transaction involving human organs should have the most severe legal consequences for organ brokers and human traffickers as well as wealthy organ recipients who knowingly manipulate people to sell their body parts.
It seems like your body parts have a price tag already. Scary, isn’t it? However, the pricing practices don’t make much difference in our overall health or life. The difference lies in the fact that organs without price tags aren’t as visible to us than the prices of drugs, therapies, and prosthetic body parts.
You pay almost every day for your health with vitamins, pain medication and lactose-free dairy. How much should you pay for life-saving drugs? Is it fair that life-saving drugs are paid for?
Martin Shkreli and insulin & co.
Everyone should have access to medication, particularly life-saving drugs. The means to heal people, the tools for relieving pain and suffering, and the assets that save lives would not cost anything in an ideal world.
Frederick Banting, the inventor of insulin, refused to sign a patent when he discovered it in 1923. It was unprofessional for a doctor profiting from a discovery that could save lives. James Collip and Charles Best, Banting’s coinventors, sold the insulin patent to University of Toronto for $1. They wanted everyone to have access to their medication.
If they saw the prices of drugs or the pricing policies at certain pharma companies, these noble gentlemen would be astonished to see how far we’ve come.
Many will recall Martin Shkreli, the ill-fated man who raised the price for Daraprim (a drug that treats parasitic infection toxoplasmosis) from $13.50 per pill to $750.00 in 2015. This is a more than 5,000% increase. The drug is still selling for hundreds of dollars, despite the fact that it costs only $1 to make. Shkreli admitted that the drug does not cost much money to make. Shkreli and his company were in a position to jack up the price because they had the exclusive rights to the drug’s sales in the U.S., without any other buyers. Shkreli was released just after being convicted on two counts each of securities fraud and one of conspiracy to commit securities theft. In 2018, he was sentenced to seven-years imprisonment.
While Shkreli’s story is quite outrageous, it’s not the first to do something similar. The New England Journal of Medicine published an article about how companies can buy the rights to generic drugs that are cheap, lock out their competitors, and raise prices.
Albendazole, which is a drug that treats certain types of parasitic infections, was approved in 1996. Its average wholesale price was $5.92 per person, but it has risen to $119.58 by 2013. The most alarming news is that insulin prices have risen dramatically in the United States. Over the past decade, the cost of four of the most popular insulin types has tripled and out-of-pocket prescription expenses for patients have more than doubled. The average monthly price rose to $450 in 2016.
The good news is that governmental regulation began to notice and take action. Congressmen have been urging drug companies and pharmacy benefit managers, and there have been many promising steps. Colorado made an unusual move in May 2019 by limiting the cost of insulin in the state. A new law states that people with diabetes will not have to pay more than $100 per month for their medication, no matter how much they use it. Similar legislation has been passed by 14 other states since then. The Affordable Insulin Now Act, which Congress supported earlier in 2022, is currently awaiting approval from the Senate. The bill would place a $35 dollar limit on insulin prices per month if it is passed.
Without effective regulatory intervention, it is certain that pharma companies will not change their excessive pricing policies in the U.S. For example, it is clear that medication costs are lower in Western European countries with price controls.
Unspeakable prices, rare diseases, and unheard of therapies
The problem isn’t just rising prices for generic drugs like insulin; it’s also the extremely high prices for new therapies and treatments options to rare diseases.
The FDA approved gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a rare childhood disorder, in May 2019. It currently costs $2.125million per patient. This experimental therapy involves injecting the patient with genetically modified viruses that carry healthy copies of the required gene.
There is currently no cure for SMA. The illness causes damage to nerves controlling muscles and progresses quickly. SMA-infected babies usually live to their second birthday. This gene therapy is the second FDA-approved, and the first for an inherited condition was approved in 2017. It also works for blindness. It is not cheap either, at $425,000 per eye.
There are other gene therapies that have revolutionized the world. Many fear that, while they may be able to eradicate deadly childhood diseases and other rare conditions from children, no one will pay for them because their price is too high.
Is it really true that the “most expensive therapies” are the most expensive? The study attempted to evaluate the value of these therapies. It came to the conclusion, however, that economic evaluations of new therapies require careful comparisons of lifetime cost and benefits with standard of care. This includes adjustments for pricing distortions. It is important to mention that this study was funded in part by Novartis Gene Therapies Inc. Therefore, we may need to wait to draw a final conclusion.
Why is gene therapy so expensive?
Pricing medication and treatments is often too complicated and, sometimes, too arbitrarily, as with Daraprim and insulin above. Experts believe that generic drugs are now cheaper than ever and that pharmaceutical companies are increasingly turning to gene therapies and rare diseases as a profit source. Major companies such as Novartis and Pfizer have invested in small patient populations.
Naturally, the question is: Should a premium be paid to treat rare diseases? What price should an orphan drug be priced at? It is possible that rare disease drugs are priced on the basis of a patient’s body weight. This means that prescriptions for adults can be much more expensive than those for children. It could be the answer if therapies can be paid in installments.
Samia Hurst, a bioethicist, said that making a profit by developing, selling, and finding pharmaceuticals was legitimate. However, she wasn’t sure what exactly made this possible. We may approve of the profit because we feel that the creativity and effort required to bring a new drug on the market should be compensated. Maybe we believe that payment is due for the production of a drug. We might not be considering merit, but the consequences. We want to encourage the development of new therapeutic advancements. Maybe we want to ensure that medical treatments are available at a reasonable cost. This could all be an excuse for pharma companies asking for fair profit margins above research and development costs.
Matt Zwolinski (political philosopher) also believes that high prices are necessary to recover the costs of researching and developing the drug. He also points out that there were hundreds of drugs that never made the cut. Companies can only make a reasonable profit long-term by charging a price well above the “marginal costs of production”. This is how society will get the drugs it needs.
It is also clear that personalised therapies outperform generic ones. They offer a cost-effective solution and can heal patients of diseases that were previously untreatable. The development of personalized treatment options is clearly the future, although companies need to offer better payment options.
However, the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies regarding Access to Medicines stipulate that companies must do everything they can to ensure that medicines in sufficient quantities are available in countries where they are needed.
These experts also suggested that companies should contribute to the development and testing of neglected diseases drugs. Companies must ensure that the drugs they create are available to all patients, not just those who are wealthy or from developed countries. This will make it difficult for others to find desperate solutions, such as crowdfunding, or even not going to the hospital at all. Gene therapies and other innovative healing methods can only be successful if they are made available to all patients.
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The post What is life worth? The Medical Futurist first published the post How Much Is Life Worth?
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By: berci.mesko
Title: How Much Is Life Worth?
Sourced From: medicalfuturist.com/how-much-is-life-worth
Published Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2022 08:00:00 +0000
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