Yes, Virginia, it Can Always Get Worse!

(OK I haven't posted in 6 months, what are you, the Post Police?  Just because the blog's been on hiatus,
doesn't mean our societal slide towards cancellation has been put on hold...)

Our regular reader (hi, honey!) will remember how last year, we disparaged certain pharmaceutical companies for their heartless, tone-deaf communication style.  We depicted their marketing guys announcing that they were denying lifesaving treatments for financial reasons while dancing atop a pile of yachts, in point of fact.

Well, it seems almost as though they read Why We're Doomed, and have taken our words to heart.  Their corporate communications have shown a remarkable transformation since then!

Whereas once they barely disguised their tactics of putting profits ahead of their customers' lives, those days are now behind us.  Today they don't bother to disguise them at all.

Generally speaking, the larger the company, the more smooth and polished their communications should be.  A slick, highly-trained PR operative can deliver even the worst news with a spin that leaves you feeling good, as though they'd just given you a candy cane rather than shoved a Christmas tree branch up your ass and lit it on fire.

So when Gilead announced FDA approval of their new Hepatitis-C fighting miracle drug Sovaldi, and set the price at $1,000 per pill (or $84,000 for a full course of treatment) you might think they'd roll out their most experienced guns to craft their message so as to be easy to swallow.

After all, estimates of the manufacturing cost of this drug range all the way up to $2 per pill - doubtless they have a solid explanation at the ready!

Deluxe Scumbag

"We didn't really say, 'We want to charge $1,000 a pill,'  We're just looking at what we think was a fair price for the value that we're bringing into the health care system and to the patients."

...says Gregg Alton, Gilead's vice president of Fairly Priced Value.

They're certainly entitled to recoup their $11 billion investment in development - or rather, their investment in a company which had already developed the drug, which they bought at the last minute.  And they'll earn a profit on just their first 150,000 customers, which is not even a tenth of one percent of the total number of potential patients worldwide.

As if wholly innocent of the harsh realities of business, Dr. Camilla Graham  (a hepatitis-C specialist in Boston) has suggested they consider dropping the price once they've achieved an initial return on their investment.  Their reply was both gentle and insightful -

"That's very unlikely that we would do that.  I appreciate the thought."

 ...says Gregg Alton, VP of Compassion at Gilead.

So what of the hundreds of millions of patients suffering from hep-C in less-developed countries, whose entire national health care budgets could be overwhelmed by just a few of those $84,000 invoices?  Gilead has thoughtfully considered pricing for them as well:

"I don't think we'll be able to get it into the low hundreds. But I think we can get it into an affordable range for them. It'll be from the high hundreds to low thousands for these types of markets."

...says Gregg Alton, Gilead's Executive Heart and Soul* of Brotherly Love.

(*ask your doctor about Soul^TM. a patented implant
made from advanced bio-compatible polymer resin)

Of course, there are enormous risks in drug development - the high failure rate of the decade-long approval process means that you're playing dice with billions of dollars, with only a distant prospect of any payoff.  Only equally high potential rewards can justify this gamble:

"Those who are bold and go out and innovate like this and take the risk - there needs to be more of a reward on that. Otherwise, it would be very difficult for people to make that investment."

...says Gregg Alton, intrepid Vice President of a daring firm which found someone with a drug already developed, just months away from approval, then fearlessly dropped a cargo container full of cash on their doorstep slightly earlier than everyone else.

Sovaldi is a dramatic step forward in treating this terribly popular disease, nearly free from side effects and almost 100% effective.  It's doubtless going to free millions of patients from both a potential death sentence, and from affordable insurance rates, forever.

However, one can only gaze in disbelief at the process which has permitted the output of Gregg Alton, VP of Public Affairs (one of his actual titles) to be approved for human consumption.