The Economics of Medical Miracles

The Academy Health* blog presents an interesting quandary in health economics. We aren't quite there yet, but the day may come soon when it is possible to essentially cure genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell. That sounds great!The problem is that these are fairly rare diseases, and that the treatment would be administered only once. So, in order to recoup their research and development costs, the purveyors would have to charge enormous prices -- on the order of a million bucks a pop. That's going to make you think, "Oh, this is like those other moral dilemmas about the allocation of scarce resources. We could use that money to save 50,000 African infants or something instead."Well, yes, but actually we already are spending it on the people with cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia -- actually a lot more than that in many cases. We don't begrudge with CF a lifetime of treatment that may cost $6 million, and they would be much happier getting a single treatment that actually cures them. But somebody has to finance it, which means we need to radically rethink how we organize the financing of medical services.Then there's Norwegian physician Jarle Breivik who discusses Obama's cancer "moonshot" in the NYT. Apart from the well-known problem that cancer is innumerable diseases and there will never be a cure for "cancer" per se, it is true that we can make progress against the multiple diseases called cancer and maybe achieve something we define as a "cure" ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs