If you are a person with a condition that requires millions of dollars worth of pharmaceuticals, even having health insurance may not be enough. Almost no individual can afford that kind of treatment, and increasingly, employer or union-based insurance plans can’t afford it either. Is the high cost of some of these medications due solely to the greed of big Pharma? In a word, no. There are many reasons for why drugs cost so much.
Tom is joined in studio by Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, the Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. In addition to being a regular guest on this program, he is one of the co-editors of a new book: The Oxford Handbook of Public Health Ethics, published just a couple of weeks ago by Oxford University Press.
