Two newborn twins need a one-dose treatment that would save their lives: Zolgensma, a $2.1M drug. Insurance (also the mother's employer) cut coverage of the drug the day after they were born.

That the insurance was cut. Ethics of private drug R&D aside researching costs resources, resources need to be reimbursed, and if you have a drug that heals a rare illness with one dose you sell very few doses. Another drug for another illness might cost as much to research, but you need a dose every month and there's millions upon millions of patients. Let's also assume that both drugs cost the same to produce, per dose. Which means that to cover total costs a single dose for the first drug might have to cost two millions, and the other 20ct.

The alternative to this is saying "You have a rare illness, tough luck, we won't research drugs for it it benefits too few people".

Definitely that insurance was cut. Drug R&D is expensive, and they need to pay people who work and have projects that don't pan out. But they should be able to spread that cost over everyone in the pool, reducing the cost to everyone to mere dollars or cents. But that requires insurance to actually fucking do their job.

They’re pro-birth, not pro-life.

It’s your fault you exist, so thoughts and prayers is all they’ll give you.

What legitimate reason would there be to price drug like that? Is that what the r&d cost to create it? Greed. Thats where 99.9% of cost issues end up for

thats less than nine months ago and insurance would have access to maternity records

They're born now, they don't matter anymore. Inside the womb: the most precious in the world. Outside the womb: fuck you, scum.

Bad faith laws? We don’t have anything like that in America.

I get It though. I fucking disagree with it, but I get it. They're a company playing by US rules. If they make an exception for these babiesz they'll have to make exceptions for others too. It's evil, but so is the entire "game" that's being played here. It makes people evil, so change the game

What revenue are talking about?

They weren't really wrong about "Government Death Panels" thing they just neglected to mention that they already existed, and were staffed by MBA-executives there to make profit instead of boring government drones there to bide their time to collect a pension.

I do that and my life still isn't worth anything to them

Your life will never mean ANYTHING to the rich

From https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/zolgensma-expensive-3552644/

Zolgensma is a one-time-only gene therapy treatment for children aged less than two years with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) that costs $2.1 million for the single treatment. The reason Zolgensma is so expensive is because that is the price Novartis has decided it is worth because it “dramatically transforms the lives of families affected by this devastating disease” and the claimed cost of bringing new drugs to market. But this price is not without controversy. For a start, the early development of Zolgensma was financed by the National Institutes of Health and several charities devoted to finding treatments for SMA, including many U.S. charities such as Sophia’s Cure, Cure SMA, Getty Owl Foundation, Fighting SMA, Jadon’s Hope Foundation, the Gwendolyn Strong Foundation, and Miracle for Madison. Many of these charities use donations by patient families and friends to subsidize research and clinical trials into new medicines for SMA. The CEO of Novartis, Vas Narasimhan, argues that gene therapies represent a medical breakthrough in the way that they offer hope of a cure for deadly genetic diseases with a single dose. In some cases, the alternative is a multi-dose treatment with incremental improvements. For example, an alternative to Zolgensma is Spinraza that is taken four times a year for life. The list price is $750,000 for the first year and then $350,000 per year after that, so about $4 million a decade. But how do they calculate the actual cost? Many companies use a value-based pricing model which calculates the cost based on how many years of life gained as well as taking into account the effectiveness of the drug. But this means putting a price on how much a life is worth, as well as ensuring the company makes a reasonable margin on their investment. Little is disclosed about the true cost of bringing a new drug to market, and Novartis didn’t develop Zolgensma but acquired it through the $8.7 billion purchase of US firm AveXis.

So there is no tangible reason why it's this expensive.

I have no fucking clue about this particular medicine, and Americans are getting an absolutely raw deal on healthcare

BUT

Non-greedy reasons that can raise the price of a drug:

1. manufacturing costs. Maybe the ingredients are expensive. Maybe the synthesis has a very low yield. Maybe storage is very expensive. Maybe storage is such a bitch the drug needs to be made on-demand. Maybe storage is straight-up impossible so the drug needs to be made on-site.
2. Low demand. If very few people need the drug, you can't spread out the cost of R&D or manufacture. Furthermore, it'll force you to use low-volume manufacturing methods, which will be more expensive. It might be so low volume that you literally just pay a chemist to synthesize the drug on a bench top, which could take weeks of labor, depending on the synthesis.
3. delivery mechanism. Suppose the drug itself is relatively cheap, but it needs to be delivered by a long-term release capsule implanted in your spleen. Suppose it needs to be delivered by IV drip continuously for a week. Suppose it needs to be taken under direct supervision for some reason.

Probably other shit, it's been a while since I studied where healthcare costs come from.

Edit: lol, sounds like the justification the pharma company is going with is "fuck you, is not a child's life worth everything you've got?"

Definitely not because Novartis is trying to recoup the 8.7 billion they spent on AveXis to acquire Zolgensma...

As an Australian the only thing I envy about the US is the Mexican food there.

I assume it doesn't, and that includes R&D cost that can't be spread across a large number of other doses.

While a healthy portion is, ugh, profit margin

Often with these rare diseases, if there's a cure or treatment for it often they require bespoke drugs. Sometimes with specialty equipment designed and built just for that drug (or drug family). Ofc with rare diseases, they probably only make like 5/year or some shit so they never scale well. In some cases (like if there's a short shelf life), they even make the drug on an as needed basis, further increasing cost

One of these specialty 2 mil dollar drug might still cost an actual 1 mil to make taking out profit margin/R&D recovery costs.

These things cost billions to create. Those billions are often (or should be anyway) spread out over the millions of people who can use the drug.

When a drug is a one time cure, for something that is rare, it becomes incredibly difficult to make any money back on that unless the cost is incedibly high, or it's government subsidized.

That's why a lot of things we probably could cure aren't cured yet. It just doesn't make sense financially to do it. And if they do do it, people like you get angry at them.

This is much less of a problem in a public single payer system, but even then some of those systems don't cover these kinds of treatments.

Go fund me is paused as they got the insurers to change their minds (with pressure from Missouri lawmakers I believe). The kiddos will get the drug they need.

Executives maybe but not the employees.

One of the earliest uses of based is by 4chan users to describe things that were Nazi adjacent or fascist that celebrities and politicians would say and do. It was "based" because the idea is that they were doing the "right" thing even though it was unpopular often doing things like being ok with needless deaths because it also meant it pushed their fascist agenda. I think op is using it ironically in this case like those 4chan cretins use it.

Since then it's been co-opted as the general Internet meme and that's how most people know it now.

It's a sarcasm

I am fairly confident it must be made from unicorn blood and the glandular excretions from the lochness monster.

on purpose

How do you know? Wouldn't more people around mean more money for them?

You don't know why people are shocked that the system they pay into for healthcare chooses not to save them? You're not shocked that we choose to kill babies?