The Life-Saving Cystic Fibrosis Drug Costs $326,000 in the U.S. The Only PERSUASIVE Argument Against this Immorality is the Egalitarian One
Non-egalitarian arguments against outrageously high prices are met with immoral, but unfortunately persuasive, counter-arguments
Read the full Boston Globe story here.
The Boston Globe story presents the totally unpersuasive (because it is not egalitarian, as I will explain below) argument of the twenty-nine doctors and scientists who protest what they call “price gouging” by Vertex Pharmaceuticals:
“However, the celebration of their achievements is overshadowed by the reality that this life-saving innovation is only available to people in wealthy countries due to the high cost set by Vertex,” the letter reads. “For the many people with [cystic fibrosis] living in poorer countries, Trikafta is simply unaffordable at current listed prices.”
The letter said it costs Vertex as little as $6,000 to make Trikafta for each patient annually. The doctors and scientists who signed it urged organizers and recipients of Breakthrough Prizes to pressure Vertex to make the drug affordable to everyone who needs it.
Dr. Meghan McGarry, a pediatric pulmonologist and cystic fibrosis researcher at the University of California San Francisco who signed the letter, said it isn’t only patients overseas who can’t afford Trikafta. Some patients at her hospital can’t get the drug unless they switch insurers. And, she said, Vertex has reduced a company co-pay assistance coupon program for its drugs that helped patients cover costs.
“While we all want pharmaceutical companies to be profitable, Vertex has stood out among drug companies with their price gouging,” McGarry said in an interview. She said Vertex has opposed the development of cheaper generic forms of its drugs or lowering prices for lower-income or middle-income countries, as other pharmaceutical companies have done for HIV and hepatitis C medications. [my emphasis—J.S.]
As some of the comments in this article point out, Vertex charges more than the $6000 cost of production for its Trikafta drug because it had to spend a lot of money before production on research and development. Yes, the U.S. government no doubt paid for some of that research (the NIH does that) but Vertex also no doubt had to pay for much of it too.
If one accepts—as I do not and neither should you!—that our current capitalist system is just (as even Dr. Meghan McGarry—one of the protesting doctors—does, since she told the Globe, “While we all want pharmaceutical companies to be profitable…”) then one’s argument that Vertex is charging too high a price fails to be persuasive, since companies must do what they must do to make a profit, right?
Note also that the “health care is the right of all” argument for using tax money to make drugs free (or very inexpensive) for those who need them is also not persuasive because it is a freeloader-friendly argument, as I point out and discuss here.
The only way to PERSUASIVELY argue that the $326,000 price is immoral is to say what WOULD be the moral price
And the only way to say what would be the moral price is to say that we should have an egalitarian society. Here’s why.
The moral price of a life-saving drug is that for any person who contributes reasonably according to ability* it should be FREE or, if it is scarce, equitably rationed for free according to need.
I know! I know! You want to know WHO WILL PAY FOR IT? Who will pay the people who do the research and who work to produce it? Who will pay the people who build the laboratories (carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and so on) that make the research possible? Who will pay the people who did the work to provide the raw materials to the factory (truck drivers, miners, and so on) that produces the drug? Don’t I know that there’s no such thing as a free lunch?
Here’s the answer.
All of the above costs are paid for by the WORK (the source of all value, you know) of the many people who contribute reasonably according to ability: the patients, researchers, factory workers, carpenters, plumbers, truck drivers, miners and so forth.
Newsflash! Dollars are just pieces of paper or computer bits and they don’t of themselves pay for diddly squat.
The people who contribute reasonably according to ability share the fruits of their labor (which includes life-saving drugs) freely with each other according to the egalitarian principle: “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need.”
The way such an egalitarian economy works is described here, and in more detail here.
If there are people who want to do the work required to make a life-saving drug, and if the other people in the society agree that such work counts as “contributing reasonably according to ability,” then the people making the drug get a green light to do it, and they are “paid” by having the right to take for free from the economy what they need (personally and for their drug-making work) or reasonably desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need. It’s not complicated!
Evidence that such an economy is—indeed was!—very practical, even on the scale of millions of people, is here.
Guess who doesn’t want you to understand this? The billionaires who hog the wealth of our society, that’s who. They HATE the egalitarian idea because it means they would no longer be a privileged immensely powerful ruling class. It means there would be genuine democracy instead of the fake democracy that covers up our current dictatorship of the rich.
Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make life-saving drugs free for those who contribute reasonably according to ability.
* Egalitarians, being reasonable people, will no doubt count children and retired elderly and people physically or mentally or for any other reason unable to work as "working reasonably" even though they do no work, and likewise deem it "reasonable work" when people care for their own or other children or for other sick adults or attend school or apprentice programs to learn skills so as to be able to work in the future.