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The Cost Of Living Analysis

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In The Cost of Living, Stephen Hall discusses the astronomical prices of cancer drugs, from those that are proven to save lives, to those that may provide only another month and a half of decent life. In America we have this idea that you cannot put a price on life, and this is the idea that Hall is trying to throw out the window, in the most humanitarian way possible. For many types of cancers, we have been using the same base drug (first line treatment) for ten years or even longer. As companies find new drugs to fight the cancers, they hope that it will be the miracle drug that will eradicate the cancer, but it usually isn’t. When they reach this conclusion, instead of returning to the chalkboard and continuing to work to improve the drug, they put the drug on the market as is, and hope it will achieve something. Not only are they putting these drugs on the market but they put price tags on them that would bankrupt anyone without some sort of third party payer. The combination of all of these drugs make up what doctors …show more content…

The best way that was mentioned in the article is by creating competition. Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is a cancer of the blood that about 5,000 Americans develop a year, according to Hall. To stay alive, patients must take a drug continuously for years, and the cost of staying alive ticks up quite rapidly. According to Hall, in 2001, when the first CML drugs came out, they cost around $30,000 a year, by 2012, the cost of the same drug had risen to $92,000 a year, more than a threefold increase. In South Korea they saw a way around this staggering price, competition. A South Korean company developed a CML drug that achieved the same thing as the American version and put the price at $21,500 a year, as a result competing CML drugs cost around $25,000 a year in South Korea, a fraction of the American price

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