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The Times' Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas have a major story exploring a key factor in rising healthcare costs: specialty drugs for rare diseases, which increasingly can carry price tags in the millions per patient per year. The trend and the impact are laid out succinctly:
The Times' Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas have a major story exploring a key factor in rising healthcare costs: specialty drugs for rare diseases, which increasingly can carry price tags in the millions per patient per year. The trend and the impact are laid out succinctly:
Rare diseases, however, aren’t all that rare. There are an estimated 7,000 of them, and about 30 million Americans have one — roughly the same number of people in the United States with diabetes. And although there are no treatments for most rare diseases, new therapies are coming on the market nearly every month, with some reaching beyond $2 million a year for a single treatment. Of 59 new drugs approved in 2018, more than half, or 34, were for rare diseases.Leaving aside the broad question of how the U.S. might contain costs for these drugs without choking off their development, the story prompted a few thoughts and questions about how these costs are currently distributed, and how that might change. Some factors to consider:
