October 21, 2016
The Washington Post had an interesting piece about Iclusig, a cancer drug that now sells for almost $200,000 a year. The piece discussed the pricing pattern for cancer drugs. It noted that the pricing of Iclusig did not follow the normal pattern, with the price soaring as its range of approved uses was limited by the Food and Drug Administration.
While it presented this as evidence of this not being a normal market, the piece never made the obvious point: the drug market is certainly not normal because the government grants patent monopolies and other forms of protection. Without these government granted monopolies almost all drugs would be cheap. Certainly none would sell for anything close to $200,000. While it is necessary to pay for research, they are other mechanisms that would almost certainly be more efficient and less prone to corruption than patent monopolies.
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