By Narcyz Ghinea. In the mid 2010s, breakthrough medicines that promised to cure hepatitis C came onto the market. The catch was, the pharmaceutical company Gilead set the price of up to £70 000 for a 3-month course of treatment. No government would pay that much given the number of people with hepatitis C. In the […]
Category: Health insurance
Unnatural experiments
By Charles Weijer and Monica Taljaard. When government health programmes are studied in cluster randomized trials, should the health programme itself be considered “routine government care” and not part of the research, or is it a research intervention to be scrutinized by the research ethics committee? Watson and colleagues argue for the former position; we […]