[baq]

> According to the ALS Association, the treatment’s list price is $1,000 per infusion, or about $146,000 annually, and it is expected to be available for use by August.

$146k/year for being able to live a better life, or maybe at all. right up there with cancer treatments according to my ethical standards.

[rayiner]

Would it be better for them to just not make the new treatment?

Stuff like this doesn't scale in the way we are used to. There are only 30,000 ALS patients in the US, and this drug only benefits a subset of those people. And it costs tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. How exactly should you price it?

Now you can say the government should pay for it. And I agree that as a general matter the government should pay for healthcare. But that's not really a workable solution here either. At that point you've got to ask the difficult but necessary question: should the government be investing that much money to help maybe a few thousand people? Imagine how many poor kids whose lives you could change with that money instead.

[epmaybe]

I don't claim to understand this aspect of healthcare very well. But I've definitely observed that the list price of medications keeps on going up, insurance keeps on paying for it, and we keep on having higher premiums. Who wins? Who loses?

[caycep]

erm. $146k for a 2 pt improvement in the rating scale compared w/ placebo. What that means for real life, who knows....