The costs of drugs don’t seem to gibe with reality.

Or is it just me who has a problem dealing with big numbers? As an example, let’s take the new drug, Ingrezza (valbenazine), for treating a manmade disease caused by taking common medications used in mental illnesses and their associated side effects. The new disease is Tardive Dyskinesia. It costs each patient $200 to $400 a day or $73,000 to $146,000 a year! There are half a million TD sufferers in the United States. If only half of them (250,000) were treated with this drug, it would afford its manufacturer up to $3.65 billion. This amount is not much lower than the $10.7 billion of Eli Lilly & Company’s sales in the first half year of 2019 for all of its drugs, as reported in C&EN, August 12, 2019, p. 13. Still, its annual sales would be only about $22 billion. While Ingrezza by itself gets 1/6 equivalent of Eli Lilly’s annual sales. Where is the rest hidden? Would someone economically intelligent explain to us plain scientists why drug sales are reported at only $billions but rarely, if ever, in $trillions, where they seem most likely to belong? hashtag#drughashtag#costshashtag#manmadehashtag#newdiseasehashtag#Ingrezzahashtag#mentalillnesseshashtag#drugcausedhashtag#valbenazinehashtag#Elilillyhashtag#tardivedyskinesia $trillionsvsbillions