A long-acting cholesterol medicine cut the risk of having a heart attack or some other serious problems by 15 to 20 percent in a big study that’s likely to spur fresh debate about what drugs should cost.
Statins such as Lipitor are cheap and cut cholesterol, but some people don’t get enough help from them. The new drug, Amgen’s Repatha, lowers cholesterol more and is given as shots every two weeks or once a month.
It costs $14,000 a year, and insurers have balked at paying without proof that it lowers heart risks. The new study gives that evidence, but the benefit is not as great as some doctors had hoped.
Results were discussed Friday at a medical conference and published by the New England Journal of Medicine.
(AP)
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2 Responses
If the insurers didn’t pay for it, the companies that make them would be forced to lower prices so individuals could afford it. The system of insurance is what is causing high prices. With insurance, the laws of supply and demand would fall, and prices would fall since few people would pay $1K per month for a drug, forcing companies to lower costs to keep sales up. As we discover when they go off patent, the likely cost of the drug, meaning the price that would cause the manufacturer to stop making the drug, is only a tiny fraction of what the insurance companies pay.
When do you realise the only story is pharma profits none of these drugs do anythong useful people with high cholesterol live longer