My personal experience here is a bit limited - I grew up in the states but after college I emigrated up to Canada so... yea I generally get scripts from my gp up here for a full year's supply at a time and end up paying something like 1/30th of a cent (CAD) per pill for it. While I was in the states I had to fight to keep my script when I transitioned from my parent's insurance to my employer's in college, and ended up paying 9$/pill for a few months but I accessibility was always maintainable without ever seeing a psych except for initial diagnosis in middle school.
There are medications I need that cost an entire order of magnitude more in the US than in Canada. I'm not exaggerating. They're about $80 full price from Canada and $800 here in the US.
A woman that uses the pill as birth control consumes 0.00365 gram of estrogen a year. At a consumption price of the pill for $300 a gram of estradiol is thus worth $82,191.79. Compare that to $44 for a gram of gold and you wonder if big Pharma is ready for disruption?
Venlafaxine (Effexor) costs 20c a dose for generic versions. Inthe US, where drugs are expensive. Under 10c (euro cents) here. I doubt the industry is TOO excited about ‘shackling’ people to it.
Estradiol is about $7 for 30 1mg pills, so more like $233 per gram. Source: goodrx.com / I'm a trans woman.
(edit) - and just to reflect on what happened to this child, in addition to the physical changes & social problems, this "treatment" would have surely induced gender dysphoria, which any trans person can tell you is awful as hell.
This is where American drug pricing does a lot of work. I used to work for a Canadian Internet pharmacy selling prescription drugs to Americans, splitting the difference between wholesale and US retail prices.
A 30-day supply of Lipitor - I think, the most-prescribed drug in America? - is something like $150–200. Our cost was something like a dollar and we'd sell it for something like ten.
"A key reason is a federal agency called the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, which regulates drug costs to avoid precisely the sort of excesses evident in the United States."
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