AFP Bucks Bipartisan Concern Over High Cost of Important Medical Treatment

July 31, 2014

A new Hepatitis C drug costs $84,000 per treatment. And the Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity thinks that’s just lovely, because free markets or something.

Sovaldi is a highly effective new drug, but one also that threatens to strain everybody’s pocket books, driving up premiums. For context, as AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni wrote, it would cost more money to treat every American with Hepatitis C with Sovaldi than the entire country spent on all prescription drugs in 2012. So naturally, there has been bipartisan concern about the pricing of the drug.
 
But not in Kochville. Americans for Prosperity just strongly denounced government efforts to make this groundbreaking treatment more affordable. This is really just a window into the Kochs’ perfect world: replace as much government as possible with the magic of the unregulated free market and let profits reign supreme. Even when it comes to matters of life and death, or public health.
Consider that the Kochs and AFP have also fiercely opposed Medicaid expansion. Koch-funded groups also helped craft the Halbig lawsuit that would kill health care subsidies for millions of Americans, and then AFP cheered when a Republican-controlled court ruled in that direction.
 
In a Koch utopia, health care, like everything else is entirely driven by unregulated markets, where insurers and drug companies should rake as much profit as possible. And if you can’t afford insurance, or life-saving treatments, well…that’s just too bad for you.

Paid for by American Bridge 21st Century Foundation