User:Doc James/Price

The most important reason to provide this information is that it is useful to our readers. More useful I would argue than which episode of which American sitcom a disease or medication occurred in. A whole sub-domain of medical research is based on prices, that of cost benefit analysis. I would like to address some of the opposes:

• We do not have prices for all countries so we should therefore provide none.
  • Organizations like the IDA Foundation sell at the prices we are quoting to all low and medium income countries (this is more than 100 countries).[1] This is better than we typically have regarding rates of diseases. Often rates of disease are only available for the United States and Europe.
• We do not give prices in all currencies.
  • We provide lot of numerical information such as the worth of a company in one currency. People know how to convert. We could build more tools to make conversion easier but that is another topic.

Change over time in the international wholesale price of 200 doses of salbutamol

• Prices change widely from year to year.
  • This is simply not true. If we look at the price data over time for salbutamol in the graph, prices generally remain stable for years. When they do change widely this is often commented on and should be included in WP. Prices do change when a med becomes generic but this is also notable and only occurs once.
• Prices vary widely between similar countries
  • Also not true. We are quoting the wholesale prices available in all low and middle income countries. Prices in high income countries are also relatively similar. Typically for expensive medications there is no availability in the developing world other than going to the developing world and buying it.
• Some people have some coverage in certain countries so they should not care
  • People are either paying directly as an out of pocket expense or indirectly via insurance or taxes. If you are lucky enough to have some entity paying on your behalf, how much they are paying is at least as interesting as what receptors something works on.
• Some of the arguments appear to be that because we cannot provide perfect information we should provide no information.
  • We do not have perfect information for anything else either. How well does medication X work in Armenia or the DRC? We typically do not know as it has never been studied their. Or how well does medication X work among those with comobidites Y and Z? We also likely have no idea as meds are usually studied in a healthier than normal patient population (most people are excluded from trails). This however does not mean we should not provide data were it has been studied and among who it has been studied. Some applies to cost information.