So its a corticosteroid about on par with prednisone, which got fast-track FDA approval to be used for muscular dystrophy.
Why should the consumer all of a sudden saddle with costs just because a corticosteroid is going to be prescribed for his specific condition now and his doctor may/may not write it off-label anymore, instead opting for the latest branded corticosteroid.
When we have been treating muscular dystrophy with all the other corticosteroids already as standard-of-care off-label?
This is some major league cringe here. Sanders is right to call this out and we haven't even got to the core issue yet. The problem is that this is not a new, or innovative therapy. The fact is corticosteroids have been being used off-label in the USA for this and other auto-immune conditions for decades now. Something is seriously wrong, and I'm not sure if the FDA is even to blame. This seems like a greater system problem.
I don't think people realize how plain jane corticosteroid therapy is, and how this so-called "new drug" doesn't even seem to have any special properties about it that make it any different from the other 20 corticosteroids we have on the market. There has to be something I'm missing, there HAS TO BE SOMETHING special about this particular corticosteroid in order to justify this.
This was going to absolutely rape health insurers for absolutely no reason, and I am guessing that's why covert insurance lobbyist Sanders got involved. This is deeper than charging a lot because of approval costs, this is literally taking a therapy that is likely not any more effective than anything else, but because the FDA passed it for a specific condition, we should start paying through the nose for it instead of continuing to get whatever random corticosteroid for nearly free. And if you know corticosteroids, you know we already had plenty and the off-label use was working out just fine.
What's next? Is someone going to take a variation of prednisone and get it approved as the brand name treatment for SLE at 190k/yr? Why not do it for every single condition that is treated off-label with corticosteroids? That'd be about 200 more new drugs ready to charge the insurers 100k a pop on. Billion dollar industry waiting to be tapped on getting every corticosteroid approved for a different condition under a brand name.
I can't quite put my finger on it, but this is wrong for more reasons than the obvious. The system needs to be examined. Fast-tracking a corticosteroid? Fingering a specific corticosteroid that doesn't seem to have any extraordinary properties compared to its cousins except that its able to be patented and branded? Patenting a corticosteroid? Its just bizarre to me. I could understand if this was a gene therapy drug or something.
The pharmaceutical company itself admits that nobody needs to stop getting it cheap, implying they just wanted to tax the insurance companies with enough doctors they intend to reprogram into prescribing their specific ridiculously expensive version. Because off-label is bad mmmkay....
