When did we decide drugs could cost millions?

Speaking of news cycles, the one surrounding last month’s approval of a Novartis gene therapy fixated on one thing: its $2.1 million price tag.

To Novartis (and many other people), the cost is worth the benefits that gene therapy provides. But to Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Drug Pricing Lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, it’s an arbitrarily high number whose justification relies on intellectual sleight of hand.

Writing in STAT, Bach argues that Novartis and the industry at large have used the decades-old practice of anchoring to sell the world on the idea that some drugs should cost millions of dollars. They’ve thrown out references to “million-dollar gene therapies” when no such things existed. They’ve claimed that the benefits of such treatments would be worth, say, $5 million, and then promised to never charge quite that much.

The net effect is that Novartis can unveil a $2.1 million therapy and call it a bargain, Bach writes.

Read more.