- The IRA bill threatens orphan drugs.
- Study finds links between the popular zero-calorie sugar substitute erythritol and an increased risk of cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke.
- But the study has limits. (NYT)
- Death on demand: Canadian euthanasia is killing about 27 people a day on average — over 10,000 a year.
Category: Drug Prices & Regulations
Friday Links
- Scott Atlas reviews our experience with Covid: mortality rates, natural immunity, vaccines, lockdowns, and more.
- Can Chat GPT replace doctors?
- More than 8 million Americans with diabetes rely on insulin; yet surveys find that one in six people who use insulin say they ration the drug because of the cost.
- Elizabeth Warren report finds that medigap insurers do what every other insurer does: reward agents for sales of its policies. Of course, seniors in Medicare Advantage plans don’t need medigap policies.
- Eli Lilly’s announcement that it will cap at $35 a month what patients pay out of their own pockets for the company’s insulin has two problems: (1) the company already had such a policy in place, and (2) the company says the cap will not have much, if any, effect on what many people are actually paying.
Free Market Competition Is the Way to Lower the Cost of Insulin and Other Drugs
In 1951, Congress stopped letting drug makers decide which drugs they would sell over the counter and which would require a prescription and turned that decision over to the FDA. Drugs already available without a prescription were “grandfathered.”
That is why, to this day, people can buy regular and NPH insulin without a prescription. Because those forms of insulin are off‐patent and because consumers comparison‐shop, they are relatively cheap: “ReliOn,” a brand available from Walmart, can cost as little as $25 a vial. Evidence suggests that prescription requirements correlate with higher drug prices and that removing them correlates with reductions in drug prices.
Wednesday Links
- Most new drugs do not cover the cost of their development. So, the pharmaceutical industry needs a few blockbusters (with annual revenues of $1 billion or more) in order to survive. HT: Tyler
- Railroad deregulation occurred under Carter, not under Trump and accidents and derailments plunged thereafter.
- Humans share 98.8 percent of their DNA with bonobos and chimpanzees.
- Is Biden about to surrender authority over US pandemic policy to the WHO?
- Prof. Marty Makary: Ten myths about Covid that were propagated by the “experts.”
- How different federal agencies view the origin of Covid.
- Yglesias on the lab leak theory.