Opinion: Accounting for hope: using ‘mean survival gain’ to price new cancer drugs
Just as price per square foot won't tell you if a house has amenities like a mountaintop view, median survival gain is blind to longer-term gains in survival offered by…
by Alice Chen and Dana Goldman
Oct 14, 2019
4 minutes
Outrage about the rising prices of prescription drugs has put cancer drugs in the spotlight. But there’s an important question that needs to be asked: What is the best pricing metric to use for them?
Economists like us spend a lot of time worrying about this in a more general context. When the government computes its consumer price index, for example, it thinks about the quality of the goods that households purchase. A computer purchased 10 years ago is almost unrecognizable compared to one purchased today, so the consumer price index must adjust for CPU speed, memory, storage capacity, and more.
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