Gilead Sciences

◼ Origin

Gilead Sciences charges $1,000 per pill for sofosbuvir — a hepatitis C cure that costs $4.29 to manufacture in India and $74 to produce in Egypt. A bipartisan Senate Finance Committee investigation found that Gilead had set the US price not based on development cost, market forces, or patient affordability, but based on what the traffic would bear from a fragmented insurance system too broken to negotiate. The investigation found R&D cost approximately $1 billion; Sovaldi earned $11.3 billion in its first year alone. Hepatitis C infects approximately 2.4 million Americans, disproportionately people who inject drugs and incarcerated populations — communities with the least political power to fight back. Patients who cannot pay — because they are uninsured, because their insurer denied coverage, because their state Medicaid program imposed restrictions — do not get cured. They develop cirrhosis, liver cancer, and die of a disease that is medically and technically curable for $4.29. This is not a pricing anomaly. It is the documented, deliberate operation of a patent-protection regime that allows private companies to convert publicly-funded scientific breakthroughs into extraction machines. The system that makes Gilead possible kills people. That is a policy choice, renewed every year Congress fails to act.

◼ Self-Made Verdict — YES

Gilead Sciences turned AIDS and hepatitis C into profit centers. They priced a hepatitis C cure at $84,000, charged $21,000 a year for an HIV prevention drug whose patents the government owned, and deliberately withheld a safer HIV drug for over a decade to block generic competition. The Senate investigated. The government sued. Gilead kept the money.

◼ Documented marks