5 March 2019 - Australia seems to have found a way to entice Big Pharma into making essential new medicines affordable. Why can’t the United States?

Why don’t streaming services like Hulu or Netflix go bankrupt? After all, most businesses couldn’t survive if customers paid a flat subscription fee each month for all they could eat or all the gasoline they could use. Yet you can pay Netflix $8.99 and watch one movie or all 342 episodes (so far) of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Netflix doesn’t care.

Netflix and Hulu can do this because they sell products with a very low marginal cost. Movies and TV shows are expensive to make. But once that’s done, each new stream costs Netflix little or nothing.

But Australia is doing something that could help a lot: treating medicines like Netflix treats shows.

In 2015, Australia signed agreements with Gilead, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck, producers of the new hepatitis C cures. For 1 billion Australian dollars — $766 million U.S. — Australia gets, for five years, all the hepatitis C medicine it can use.

Read New York Times article