Arsenic, Patents, and the World. In the Pipeline:

Arsenic, Patents, and the World. In the Pipeline:: "So what does set the price? What sets the price is what sets most prices in this world: what the market will bear. A drug that only treats a small number of patients every year is going to cost a lot of money, no matter what it’s made out of. A company will not market a compound unless they can use its profits to help defray the costs of all the things that don’t make it to market at all. Cephalon is charging what their market will bear, which is their right, but their market is the health insurance organizations of the industrialized world. That’s another thing to remember – drug companies aren’t selling direct to patients most of the time. They’re selling to insurance companies, and first-world health insurance will put up with a lot of things that no one else can or will. There’s a lot of room to talk (and to complain) about this (I think it distorts pricing signals something fierce), but all the complaints have to start with the realization that this is how things are now set up. Cephalon, for its part, says that it’s open to compassionate use of its drug – that is, providing it to people in need who absolutely cannot afford it. With any luck articles like the Nature Medicine one will help to get the word out about that, an"