Ledipasvir / Sofosbuvir

I got the medication for it.

It's called Harvoni.

It's in my medicine cabinet as we speak, still not even open.

Promise you.

But the idea that you pay health insurance, and then have to pay out of pocket, it's crazy.

And it goes back 10 years or so to Gilead and the Hep C cures, to Harvoni and Sovaldi.

Instead of taking this massive moment of celebration that we have cured this devastating disease, we instead, as a country, fixated on this drug costs $100,000.

And Any academic, if you look at curing Hep C, would gladly pay $100,000.

And You know, what is the value of curing Alzheimer's? And we even we tested these waters with Adjahelm and don't need to get into the particular elements of that saga.

But we as we have to be having this conversation about what will we pay for and how will we pay for it? And let's think of novel reimbursement methods.

Instead of just trying to point the fingers, I'll take, let's say Bernie Sanders had his way, and we cut that Sovaldian-Harvoni cost by 50%.

If you cut all drug costs by 50% tomorrow, everybody is cutting their costs.

Wow, okay, does that include the R&D? Wow.

Gilead Sciences pushed the price even higher after releasing Harvoni, which reduced treatment time.

They charged $94,500 per course, likely to make up the lost profit.

The situation only rectified itself when competition was introduced, shattering the Gilead monopoly.

So for many, many, many years, I would just refuse any new treatment that came out for hepatitis C.

Well, finally, I think in 2015, my daughters came to me and there was a commercial on TV for Harvoni.

that had come out to treat hepatitis C.

So I'd lived with it for 20, 25 years.

And I went on Harvoni for six weeks and got cured of hepatitis C.

So there's things that you can, you have, you can deal with what you can deal with and you have to accept what you can't control and you just have to keep living.

And I think that, that lesson would help more of us if we would do that, because I think a lot of when we're accused of crimes, it's, a bad decision that was made in anger or drunk or high or going through a divorce or separation.

Let's talk about why they make more money by keeping us sick.

So back in 2014, a pharmaceutical house by the name of Gilead put on the market, got FDA approval for Harvoni.

and they brought it to market in the eu in canada in the united states and it had a greater than 90 cure rate for hepatitis c astounding miraculous every family doctor and every other doctor on the planet rejoiced here's a cure for a chronic medical condition that previously we had no cure for.

We just had to treat the symptoms.

And so you would think that this would have been touted to the heavens and beyond, that there would have been news stories for years and years about this, that this would have started an avalanche of new discoveries by big pharmaceutical houses that resulted in the cure for chronic medical conditions.

But unfortunately, that's not what happened, and here's why.

It became obvious during the early usage of Harvoni that it absolutely did cure hepatitis C.

And you would think every human on the planet would be happy about that.