Medicine is rapidly increasing in price for a number of reasons:
1. Medicine has advanced, and many more diseases are curable or treatable than ever before. For example, 30 years ago, most types of acute leukaemia would have been fatal within weeks to months. There was no effective treatment - you could give blood transfusions, but sooner or later there would be a problem from the leukaemia or a severe infection and you would die. Now, medicine sets out to *cure* many acute leukemias. We have developed bone marrow transplantation, a technqiue that needs heroic efforts to save people from the effects of treatment. Infections with all sorts of weird germs, having the transplanted immune system reject the recipient's body, and so on. It's only in recent years that we've had the drugs to deal with these infections and rejection - many of these compounds are highly exotic, costing hundreds of $ per dose.
2. We have far more tests that can be done, than ever before. If you had a chest X-ray which showed a possible tumour 50 years ago, your physician would probably just order another chest x-ray in a few months to see what was going on - if it was lung cancer, you'd probably die in the interim. Now, you'd have a CT scan, maybe an endoscopy and biospy, then if it was cancer, you'd go on and have chemo or radiotherapy or surgery.
3. Where treatments are already established, it is becoming more common to have more and more tests, and the treatment is getting more sophisticated. Every test done before an operation, can make the operation easier and safer and more effective - but they add cost. We now know that following a heart attack, your physician should have carefully considered 4 seperate drugs - there is clear evidence that each one adds benefit to the others. Only 15 years ago, following a heart attack, you'd just be on aspirin.
There can be a delay in competing products, because much of the hard work will be done before products are announced. Viagra was discovered by accident - a drug for high-blood pressure with several years of research behind it, during trials it was found to have an interesting side effect. All that was needed was paperwork, the factories were already designed and ready to be built, the trials were ready to go ahead. Competitors had years of work ahead of them to release a similar product. Several have now got there, and there are more in the pipeline.
4. Equipment like MRI and CT has progressed a long way. While the price may not have changed much, the modern equipment is incredibly more advanced. 20 years ago, you'd be luck if your hospital had a CT scanner, and if they did, it would only really be useful for looking for relatively 'obvious' things like strokes or brain haemorrhages, and not for small things like bowel cancers. Now, they are so detailed they can be used for examining the heart, vessels in the lung, kidney stones, etc. Same with MRI - 10 years ago, you'd probably have to go to a university hospital to find a scanner. Now almost every hospital has one. 10 years ago, an MRI scan would take 2 hours, and give grainy images with huge pixels. Now, a scan takes 30 minutes, and gives images so clear, you'd be hard pressed to see more if you had actually cut someone open to have a look. This has been done while keeping costs relatively constant - the costs of an MRI scanner are primarily the superconducting magnet and the cryogenics plant to keep it cold - technology there has progressed far more slowly than the computers used to capture the signals and convert them into pictures.
1. Medicine has advanced, and many more diseases are curable or treatable than ever before. For example, 30 years ago, most types of acute leukaemia would have been fatal within weeks to months. There was no effective treatment - you could give blood transfusions, but sooner or later there would be a problem from the leukaemia or a severe infection and you would die. Now, medicine sets out to *cure* many acute leukemias. We have developed bone marrow transplantation, a technqiue that needs heroic efforts to save people from the effects of treatment. Infections with all sorts of weird germs, having the transplanted immune system reject the recipient's body, and so on. It's only in recent years that we've had the drugs to deal with these infections and rejection - many of these compounds are highly exotic, costing hundreds of $ per dose.
2. We have far more tests that can be done, than ever before. If you had a chest X-ray which showed a possible tumour 50 years ago, your physician would probably just order another chest x-ray in a few months to see what was going on - if it was lung cancer, you'd probably die in the interim. Now, you'd have a CT scan, maybe an endoscopy and biospy, then if it was cancer, you'd go on and have chemo or radiotherapy or surgery.
3. Where treatments are already established, it is becoming more common to have more and more tests, and the treatment is getting more sophisticated. Every test done before an operation, can make the operation easier and safer and more effective - but they add cost. We now know that following a heart attack, your physician should have carefully considered 4 seperate drugs - there is clear evidence that each one adds benefit to the others. Only 15 years ago, following a heart attack, you'd just be on aspirin.
That is utter rubbish. The drug companies are at each other's throats to bring out competitors. For each successful class of drugs, there are so many direct competitors that it is bewildering - many health organisations now limit the range of drugs for each condition in order to keep stock-keeping manageable. There is no point in a pharmacy stocking 'Losec' and its 4 direct competitors. Maybe they could manage Viagra and its 2 direct competitors (cialis and levitra). What about AZT and its 5 direct competitors, that are practically exactly the same?
There can be a delay in competing products, because much of the hard work will be done before products are announced. Viagra was discovered by accident - a drug for high-blood pressure with several years of research behind it, during trials it was found to have an interesting side effect. All that was needed was paperwork, the factories were already designed and ready to be built, the trials were ready to go ahead. Competitors had years of work ahead of them to release a similar product. Several have now got there, and there are more in the pipeline.
4. Equipment like MRI and CT has progressed a long way. While the price may not have changed much, the modern equipment is incredibly more advanced. 20 years ago, you'd be luck if your hospital had a CT scanner, and if they did, it would only really be useful for looking for relatively 'obvious' things like strokes or brain haemorrhages, and not for small things like bowel cancers. Now, they are so detailed they can be used for examining the heart, vessels in the lung, kidney stones, etc. Same with MRI - 10 years ago, you'd probably have to go to a university hospital to find a scanner. Now almost every hospital has one. 10 years ago, an MRI scan would take 2 hours, and give grainy images with huge pixels. Now, a scan takes 30 minutes, and gives images so clear, you'd be hard pressed to see more if you had actually cut someone open to have a look. This has been done while keeping costs relatively constant - the costs of an MRI scanner are primarily the superconducting magnet and the cryogenics plant to keep it cold - technology there has progressed far more slowly than the computers used to capture the signals and convert them into pictures.
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