In one of the most expensive drug ad campaigns of the year (totaling an estimated $100 million) drugmaker Gilead is pushing a hepatitis C drug, Harvoni, that is straining states' healthcare budgets around the country. As STAT reports, Harvoni's $94,500 per person price tag has raised an outcry among state leaders whose Medicaid budgets can't handle the cost.
...A Senate committee in December excoriated Gilead for putting profits over patients when it set the prices of its two drugs. “If Gilead’s approach is the future of how blockbuster drugs are launched in America, it’s going to cost billions and billions of dollars to treat just a fraction of patients in America,” Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said at the time.
Harvoni has generated $12 billion in US sales since late 2014.
Read more, on STAT: Inside the huge ad buys for the $1,100-a-pill hepatitis C drug