What medication?

Cancer drug which will extend life on average 5 months for the terminally ill at a cost of $100,000. See previous posting

We as US citizens thru our Federal taxes support research for many new drugs and treatments and evaluations of same and much more.

When I was doing basic research I too had federal grant money support for what I was doing.

So what you say doesn't surprise me at all.

And that drug will not be made cheaply somewhere else b'c it's patented and patents run for a good long time.

Carolyn

My daughter is a bio-chemist working in the pharmeceutical industry; she works in the Denver area for a company that produces both name brand and generic drugs. She is the final quality lab supervisor for the generic drug arm of the company. As much care and science goes into the generics as in the name brands.

Patents for a drug can last as long as twenty years, however exclusivity usually is in the three to five year range. The really expensive and groundbreaking drugs tend to be the exclusive right of the developer for up to twelve years before the drug can be produced by a generic manufacturer.

And by the way, the U.S. is the country of choice for inexpensive pharmeceutical manufacturing because of our habit of cleanliness, attention to detail, precision workmanship and relative (compared to Germany and Switzerland) low wage scale for a scientifically technical workforce.

Prescription drugs save and lengthen lives and increase the quality of life. US government support of drug R&D is great investment for us as a society.

Chervil2

As a side note: great drugs are available to the rest of the world at least partly because we are willing to pay so much for them in this country.

Case in point is Canada. Canada has a real sweet deal because they are sold drugs for less there then we can purchase them for here. When we started to inquire as to whether we could buy them from Canada we saw resistance from the Canadian government. Why? Because someone has to pay for all the research to produce those drugs to begin with.

If we started to purchase all of our pharmacuticals from Canada the pharmacuticals companies would be forced to charge the Canadians more.

Fact is that there is no free lunch and someone must pay in the end. Canada's nationalized health care makes it more difficult to extract money from Canadian patients then US patients, however, when push comes to shove the prices would either go up or the drugs would stop being produced and researched.

As yet another side note, my brother in law has lung cancer and has 3 months live. He was told this about 2 weeks ago. He has 6 kids the youngest of which is 5. I don't think he would want to take $100,000 out of his family's hide to live another 3 months but if it bought him 5 years that may be another story.

Greg