A Week-End- AbbVie

On Friday, the FDA approved AbbVie's Viekira Pak.
AbbVie had done Gilead a huge favor pricing its new hepatitis C drug on par with Gilead's Harvoni.
 
AbbVie announced a deal with Express Scripts making Viekira Pak the Exclusive hepatitis C drug covered by the pharmacy benefits manager for patients infected with the genotype 1 virus, [most common in US]. Gilead's Sovaldi will still be available for other genotypes 

Neither Express Scripts nor AbbVie is disclosing how much of a discount to get the exclusivity. You can't blame them; it's not to either company's advantage to disclose it, tipping off the authorities, the public, and the Congressional bodies.

Gilead was down 14% on the day of the annoucement,  investors are worried about the potential to be knocked out of other markets or give steep discounts. The discount problem is compounded because the price that government programs Medicare and Medicaid pay for drugs are set based on the price drug-makers give to private insurers. We could be in a full-blown price war soon between corporation to their own benefits.

With a thousand Dollars [$1000] per day treatment, the Pharmaceutical companies, PBMs and the Insurances having a FIESTA while the 3 Millions US patient is paying three folds the price of a European or Canadian patients. 

Chuck Schumer asking how come the Airline tickets is priced high while oil prices collapsing?  The answer is simple.
You don't have to travel, but you have to have health. Pay a little attention to what is important.

Just a thought.