spookybuttons: shikiswife:bpdsaeran: i have an immensely personal story about this quote because
spookybuttons: shikiswife: bpdsaeran: i have an immensely personal story about this quote because it was done by goldman sachs after the event of sofosbuvir+daclastavir, a combo of drugs which essentially cure Hep Ci remember this so vividly because i was in a support group for hep C patients, and one of the reasons a support group was needed on first place was that the treatment of Hep C was such a brutal, fucked up thing. Interferons were a nightmare. The side effects were awful, and we kept losing patients who would simply give up because they couldn’t handle it. Their bodies hurt. They felt tired all the time. They lost their appetites. Peginterferon often caused an extremely difficult to handle depression with insomnia and suicidal intent.I stayed in that support group for little over a year, organizing meetings, answering questions and just generally providing support for these people. And then, a few months after I left, the Ministry of Health caved in and approved Sofosbuvir+Daclastavir into the public system. The reason why it took so long is that the pricing for that medication is fucking absurd - around $50k per patient per month, 3 months minimum, totalling a stunning $150k per patient, which meant a big cost for a universal healthcare system already stretched thin. The estimated production cost for those drugs, for the entire 12-week-course, were estimated to be $200.That support group was my professor’s life project - she’d been running it for over a decade. She knew everyone by name. She gathered their life stories into a book. A couple years after I left, we met again. I asked her, of course, how was the support group coming along. And she teared up, and she said, “It’s over. They’ve been cured.” I tear up when I think about that, too. Cause this ‘unsustainable business model’ to me has names, has faces, has stories. That’s, exactly, what ‘not lucrative enough’ means. -- source link