May 16, 2019
It’s no secret that medication is prohibitively expensive for a lot of people and that the problem is only getting worse. While Medicare drugs rising at 10x the rate of inflation, for every drug that saw cost go down in 2018 there were 96 drugs that saw prices go up.
It gets even worse when it comes to specialty drugs, which are used to treat more complex conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and HIV. These drugs are only a fraction of the drugs that are dispensed, as they’re less commonly prescribed, but because of that they account for nearly half of the cost of prescription drugs.
It was the personal experience of Deepak Thomas that led him to found Phil, a company whose mission it is to make specialty drugs more available and affordable. Thomas, who previously had Lyme disease, told me that getting access to care, and to the medication he needed, was actually worse than dealing with the disease itself. Read rest here.