Editorial:​ Taxpayers​ paying​ twice​ for​ drugs

Sep 4, 2017 | Bad Credit Loans, Bank Lending, Business Lending, Business Loans, Finance, Working Capital

Gilead Sciences has a knack for putting itself at the center of the drug pricing debate.The company drew public ire when it priced the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi at $84,000 after buying its developer for $11 billion. Last week, it agreed to pay $11.9 billion for Kite Pharma, whose non-Hodgkin lymphoma treatment will sport a price tag above $500,000. Don’t let the wow factors behind this new drug—personalized medicine, a one-time treatment course, potentially curative—mask what’s actually driving its price. It’s Wall Street, not the cost of developing the drug or its medical value.Since its creation in 2012, Kite Pharma spent just $304.3 million in developing CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor T-cell) therapies, which work by genetically modifying a cancer patient’s immune cells