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I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I think it might be a bundle vs a la carte argument. For issues that tend towards short term treatments (eg a handful of antibiotic pills to mitigate the risk of wound infection) then you don't want to pay the same total price as someone who is treating some chronic condition.

I can't find statistics on comparing one-off and routine prescription drug use. CDC data from 2014 shows that when asking about a 30 day period 47% of the population used >1 prescription drugs, 21% used >3 drugs, and 11% used >5 drugs. That suggests to me that there is a large population of people who could be bundled together, but for the context of the article this would all depend on the specific treatments.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/079.pdf




> I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I think it might be a bundle vs a la carte argument. For issues that tend towards short term treatments (eg a handful of antibiotic pills to mitigate the risk of wound infection) then you don't want to pay the same total price as someone who is treating some chronic condition.

Yeah this is what I meant. The article says that the Australian government offset the high cost of new Hep-C drugs by negotiating a flat rate of $7.5k per person per year for any Hep-C drugs, and then talks about the high cost of penicillin and epipens.

Nobody would use Netflix if the subscription fee had to account for films that cost billions in R&D and only 10 people were going to watch.




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