covid vaccine

for a 240mg infusion the clinic charges $19,000 and insurance actually gets $9500. i once saw a price for a dose listed as $6500.000

they are advertising the hell out of Opvidio and Keytruda on national TV. probably what a $50m campaign or more?

Welcome to the Ponzi scheme that is US health care. the hospital has a list price, insurers negotiate with them and ignore the list price. here is the rub; why do they have a list price so high? well you can always lower teh price i guess. like new cars.
I assume if your someone without Health Insurance they would bill you full price. $9500 seems fair for the infusion, if a dose of opvido really cost $6500. i get a few thousand dollars worth of nurses and technology and band-aids, etc.

does a does of opvido cost SBM $5500 to make and they mark it up $1000? or does it cost $9.95 to make and they mark it up $9490.05 . no one knows and they aren’t telling.

ps: i just enrolled for 2020. the premium price jumped over $100 a month to $1100 and the out of pocket maximum doubled.

no warning, no explanation.

Here is something more you can marvel on.

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/can-23b-market-for-pd-1-blockers-cancer-grow-pan-adjuvant-use-key-report

Immuno-oncology drugs that block the checkpoint PD-1 have been one of the biggest success stories in the pharma industry, creating blockbusters like Bristol Myers Squibb’s Opdivo and Merck’s Keytruda. The embrace of the drugs to treat many types of metastatic cancer has created a $23 billion market.

But that market is slowing, raising a worrisome question on Wall Street: How can companies like BMS and Merck continue to fuel the growth of PD-1 inhibitors?

The answer is in “pan-adjuvant” settings, in which patients are given PD-1 blockers before and/or after surgery along with other treatments to boost their chances of beating their cancer, analysts at Bernstein said in a note to investors earlier this week. For Merck and BMS, pan-adjuvant approvals could add at least $12 billion to their annual haul from PD-1 drugs in the next eight years—with the lion’s share of that going to Keytruda, they predicted.

Melanoma is an extremely small market. Of 200,000 diagnoses per year, only stage IV and some stage III utilize the drugs which is even a much smaller amount of patients. These pharma companies require huge markets so they are looking to get approvals for their drugs in other areas to treat different cancers and as pan adjuvant treatment pre and post surgery. This would greatly expand their profits since the above link clearly shows how that particular drug market is starting to rapidly slow.

The prices are whatever the market will bear.
I used to live in Canada. A migrane pill was $11 Canadian per pill and here in MI one pill was $61 U.S. Viroptic eye drops are $39 Canadian in Canada versus $365 US here. Now tell me this is not absolute craziness? It literally makes your head spin.

If you have insurance, the prices are set. If you have no insurance some of the hospitals give you an automatic 40 % off. So it is what you can bargain for. I think there is lots of room for them to manouver. I get the feeling that they are operating like banks. They make their money in the first few infusions and the rest is just gravy.