Gilead Demands $2,340 Per Medicare Patient's Life; Patients Og Private Insurance Will Pay Much More-- Why Hasn't The Company Been Nationalized Yet?

Let me make a 9-part Wendell Potter Twitter thread into a couple of narrative paragraphs. It starts with the whistleblower and former VP of Cigna wanting to puke:

I honestly wanted to vomit when I read this press release from UnitedHealth disclosing how huge its windfall profits over the last 3 months have been, while millions of Americans lost their jobs & health insurance & over 100k lost their lives. You have to wade through 2 paragraphs of complete BS about how “compassionate” UnitedHealth’s employees are, before getting to the real purpose of the release: telling shareholders just how richer they are now.

But there’s a problem for UnitedHealth here... When I was at Cigna, I'd help write quarterly earnings releases. I know the tricks corporate flacks use to try to soften bad news. In UnitedHealth’s case, the bad news was an incredible embarrassment of riches!

That won’t look good to the rest of the country. What to do? Their flacks knew people would be outraged by their profiting off of the pandemic, so they began the release with self-congratulatory nonsense about how the company had “expanded its #COVID19 response efforts” to “address the urgent needs of underserved communities.” You have to wade through that crap before finding that the company had its most profitable quarter EVER, making over $6.6 BILLION in profits, as thousands of other companies had to shut their doors & lay off millions.

Even that $6.6 billion number obscures just how much the company made. They took in $9.2 billion in profits from its operations, nearly 2x what it made over the same 3 months last year. The net profit margin of its insurance business nearly tripled, from 5.4% to 14.3%. Get this-- its “medical loss ratio” (how much it actually pays in medical claims for every dollar it collects in premiums) dropped like a rock, from 83.1% to 70.2%. In other words, during a pandemic, the company paid far less than usual to help people with medical issues! These numbers should make your blood boil & remind you that insurers are unnecessary middlemen. UnitedHealth made all this $ while the number of people “served” by them fell by more than 1.1 million. This game will continue as #COVID19 slams big states like Florida & Texas. I knew insurers would thrive during #COVID19, as elective procedures were cancelled. But the size of UnitedHealth’s windfall shocked even me. It says all you need to know about our health care: During a crisis, millions are suffering, but insurance companies are booming.

This kind of thing makes most of my twitter followers do more than just want to vomit. A little poll I put up yesterday:

There is a growing consensus that Gillead Science's remdesivir seems to cut the risk of death in some patients with severe COVID-19. Gilead has kept the supply low and the prices high and is certainly profiteering gigantically now charging $390 per vial.

In a statement, Gilead Sciences chairman and CEO Daniel O’Day said the company has set a price for governments of developed countries of $390 per vial. Based on current treatment patterns, the vast majority of patients are expected to receive a 5-day treatment coursing using 6 vials of remdesivir, which equates to $2,340 per patient.

In the US, the same government price of $390 per vial will apply. Because of the way the U.S. system is set up and the discounts that government healthcare programs expect, the price for U.S. private insurance companies, will be $520 per vial.

Gilead has entered into an agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) whereby HHS and states will continue to manage allocation to hospitals until the end of September. After this period, once supplies are less constrained, HHS will no longer manage allocation.

“In the developing world, where healthcare resources, infrastructure, and economics are so different, we have entered into agreements with generic manufacturers to deliver treatment at a substantially lower cost. These alternative solutions are designed to ensure that all countries in the world can provide access to treatment,” O’Day added.

U.S. taxpayers underwrote the cost of developing remdesivir. Because of a nightmare, corrupt neo-liberal president from Arkansas, Gilead was set free to rip off those same American taxpayers. Daniel O'Day should be tried and thrown in prison with his board of directors. Trump will never do that; neither will Biden. Gilead is licensing the drug to pharmaceutical companies in India, Egypt and Pakistan. "These licensing allow the companies to gain the technology used for remdesivr from Gilead and manufacture them at their own scale for faster availability to the public. Additionally, the agreement lets these companies set their own prices for the generic product they produce. The licenses are royalty-free until the World Health Organization declares the end of the Public Health Emergency of International Concern regarding COVID-19, or until a pharmaceutical product other than remdesivir or a vaccine is approved to treat or prevent COVID-19, whichever is earlier, Gilead said." Generous of the American taxpayer, isn't it? Watch this, especially if you were brainless enough to have not voted for Bernie:





So where does Trump come in? Because you know if there's some dirty money to be made by ripping people off, he's there, right? Yesterday, CNBC reported that Bernie and Elizabeth Warren slammed the Trumpist regime for giving the Gilead crooks a "windfall" deal. They-- and allied senators-- said "the deal will give Gilead up to $500 million in revenue borne almost entirely by American taxpayers, 'in whole or in part' through higher insurance premiums. 

“Outside analysts have concluded that ‘The deal is amazingly good for Gilead’s executives and shareholders and amazingly bad for everyone else-- bad for taxpayers, terrible for public health, and unethical,’” the lawmakers wrote in the later dated Thursday. “We are therefore requesting information from the Department to help us better understand why President Trump-- or whichever Administration officials were responsible-- would strike such an expensive deal, and what steps the Administration is taking to ensure sufficient supply of the drug.”

...The deal gives the U.S. more than 500,000 treatment courses of the antiviral drug for U.S. hospitals through September, the Department of Health and Human Services announced June 29. That represents 100% of Gilead’s projected production for July and 90% of production for August and September, according to the agency. Gilead said it would sell remdesivir for $520 per vial in the U.S. to patients with private insurance and $390 per vial to federal insurance programs like Medicare as well as foreign countries. The majority of patients treated with remdesivir receive a five-day treatment course using six vials of remdesivir, the company said. That would bring the cost to $2,340 for foreign and U.S. Medicare patients and $3,120 for U.S. patients with private health coverage.

That means Gilead is charging “American health insurers the highest prices in the world,” the senators wrote.

“In other words, America’s private health insurers-- and, ultimately, all families and businesses that pay for these costs via health insurance premiums-- will be paying $860 more than governments in other countries will pay,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

There are no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments for Covid-19, which which has infected more than 13 million people worldwide and killed at least 584,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Remdesivir, which was being developed as early as 2009, was granted an emergency use authorization by the FDA in May after the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases released preliminary results from a study that showed Covid-19 patients who took the drug usually recovered after 11 days, four days faster than those who didn’t take it.

When Azar announced the agreement last month, he called it “an amazing deal to ensure Americans have access to the first authorized therapeutic for COVID-19. To the extent possible, we want to ensure that any American patient who needs remdesivir can get it.