Maybe copays are bad

That was the single consensus of a debate on drug pricing between a biotech CEO, an investor, and two policy experts. The whole idea behind copays is to limit wasteful spending by giving patients some financial responsibility for the care they receive, often referred to as “skin in the game.”

But that might be a faulty premise.

“I get it for Botox. But when a patient has cancer, they have a ton of skin in the game,” said John Maraganore, the chief executive officer of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. “And their physician, prescribing the medicine they ultimately take to treat their cancer, is someone who should not be thinking, ‘Gee, I might want to give them a different drug because it might be less expensive.’”

Then he got into a lively debate with the think-tanker Avik Roy over why insurance is so expensive that invoked single-malt Yamazaki 18.

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