Readers React: How the new $95,000 hepatitis C drug is really a bargain

To the editor: Regarding the exorbitant price of Harvoni, the new hepatitis C drug, David Lazarus writes that it costs $95,000 for a course of treatment. This is misleading. (“Here’s why drugmakers are held in low esteem,” column, Aug. 28)

Most insurance companies have negotiated with Gilead Sciences, the drug’s maker, for, on average, a price 46% lower than list, according to the company. It costs even less for people who need only eight weeks of treatment. Additionally, patients without insurance or with unaffordable co-pays can obtain assistance from the company.

In years past, hepatitis C required a drug combination that worked about 50% of the time. The drugs required not 12 or eight weeks like Harvoni but anywhere from 24 to 48 weeks, at an average price of $25,000, which had to be repeated in cases of non-response. The drugs often caused expensive-to-treat complications of their own and prevented people from working.

If you do the math, Harvoni’s actual price is right in line. And it works in more than 90% of cases and with few side effects.

Yes, this is wrong, but comparing it to the price of diabetes care over the course of a lifetime, you have a veritable bargain.

Barbara Kaplan, Los Angeles

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To the editor: Janusz Ordovar, a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George H.W. Bush who was quoted by Lazarus, thinks Americans actually believe that high drug prices are necessary to encourage research into new drugs.

So, Ordovar would have us believe that only Americans should support pharmaceutical research, while the rest of the developed world pays much less?

How much longer should we have to listen to this canard? It’s bad enough that U.S. consumers pay more for healthcare than the rest of the world for a system that delivers mediocre results.

There’s a simple explanation for high drug costs in America: The pharmaceutical industry is propping up politicians’ increasingly expensive election campaigns with money that’s intended to maintain the status quo of ever-increasing drug prices.

Greg Ryan, Woodland Hills

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