My little Chihuahua, BeBe (See image) developed glaucoma about 18 months ago. I found out about it when I took her to the vet for something else. She was totally blind in her left eye. I learned that Chihuahuas are one of the breeds that tends to get glaucoma.
Well, I had to take her to an eye specialist. We treated both eyes with drops for about 6 months, and finally the vet said the pressure was building up in the blind eye, and we were going to have to remove it. We did, at a cost of about $1650, and had a prosthesis put in. Now she has to get one kind of drop in the left eye and another in the right eye every day.
She goes to the eye vet every two months for a 10 minute visit in which the good eye is tested for possible intraocular pressure build-up. This costs about $80.
Now sit down when you read this next sentence. That liquid costs $5290 per pound!!!! That is $330.75 per oz or $11.66 per gram. Now consider that it is only a 0.125% concentration of the active ingredient. If that is 0.125% by volume then that is a cost of $8400 per milliliter of demecarium bromide!!!!!
Can you imagine the profit margin on this?
In this country we have stood by like dummies and allowed the pharmaceutical industry to rape us for our necessary medications. We have allowed them to feed us the lie that research and development costs must be recovered. There is no way that chemicals like this one cost this much.
When capitalism is allowed to set the price on necessary medications and medical procedures it is bound to end up in this way. This is not free market economics. This is an absolute requirement for life. And the sociopaths on Wall Street and at the pharmaceutical companies know it. The fact of the matter is that when the demand curve is inelastic the law of supply and demand doesn't apply.
