Prognosis
Doctors Who Helped Develop Heart Drug Now Balk at $225,000-a-Year Price
The breakthrough pill costs $651 a day, and may be used by far more patients than anticipated.
This article is for subscribers only.
Wearing a revolutionary-era tricorn hat, doctor Mathew Maurer stood at a lectern in front of an audience of fellow cardiologists in Philadelphia, decrying the price of a new medication that had the potential to help many of his heart-failure patients.
The drug, Pfizer Inc.’s tafamidis, cost $651 a day, Maurer told them—equal to a patient’s food budget for a month. Drugs don’t work if people can’t afford to take them, he said, and the pharmaceutical company’s $225,000-a-year price was well out of bounds.