Yttrium-90 microsphere treatments. It's a selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) that can be used to treat liver cancer and colorectal cancer. It is around $20,000 per dose. One patient may need multiple doses.
Donating 5,000 of these to a few key hospitals could do a lot of good for the world.
Edit: thank you for the award. I don't know how to identify the awarding person under the new Reddit system!
Y-90 has a half-life of just over 2.5 days. Sorry to ruin your altruistic aspirations, but after you treat all eligible patients, most of it would decay to stable and useless material. I appreciate the idea though
Is anyone set up to make 5000 doses all at once? I mean the question doesn't constrain you to getting the 5000 y-somethings all at once, and if you'd have wait anyway...
Basically they are on-demand only, given its exceptionally short lifespan (at least in the field of radiotherapy). You also need a nuclear reactor to manufacture this material, so that adds to the cost, safety and complexity. It's also a quality assurance nightmare from my perspective
Lovely thought, except the hospital is still going to charge full price, maybe more because it’s a ‘special batch’, then bonus their CEO. The insurance companies are going to deny coverage because of the special pricing and the cost will fall to the patient. Then, because there were higher claims made that year (even though they didn’t pay) they raise everyone’s rates and bonus their CEO.
This is the best answer I’ve seen to this question so far. I wish there were more compassion and less greed in the world that a $20,000 life potentially life saving medication even exists when I doubt it costs anywhere near that to produce. I worked as a pharmacy technician and the staggering costs of so many medications that I had people turn down picking up because their insurance wouldn’t cover it and they couldn’t afford the hugely overpriced out of pocket costs (I had one elderly man with a $1000 monthly med his insurance had dropped coverage on and he was quite dismayed by the new cost). We live in a world of such abundance and still corporations and pharmaceutical companies want more without giving back anything.
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u/Clever_Mercury 5d ago edited 2d ago
Yttrium-90 microsphere treatments. It's a selective internal radiation therapy (SIRT) that can be used to treat liver cancer and colorectal cancer. It is around $20,000 per dose. One patient may need multiple doses.
Donating 5,000 of these to a few key hospitals could do a lot of good for the world.
Edit: thank you for the award. I don't know how to identify the awarding person under the new Reddit system!