If you’ve been following the saga of drug shortages in this publication, you know how America’s cancer institutions are scrambling to obtain platinum-based drugs for their patients.
There is general agreement that the United States spends too much on health care, especially on pharmaceuticals. But what we spend on drugs is not simply a function of price. If eggs double in price, people can simply cut the number of eggs they eat in half. Simply stated, cost is the product of (price per unit times the number of units purchased).
