Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines

by Victor Roy

Overview

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org.

Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.
 
Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520388710
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	245
Sales rank:	1,089,889
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Victor Roy, MD, PhD, is a family physician, sociologist, and a fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University.

Editorial Reviews

"The book includes a complete list of references and an overview of data sources and will be quite useful for graduate courses in health care services and administration programs as well as public health and medical schools more generally."

CHOICE

"Roy convincingly shows through this example how venture capital, Wall Street, and the industry’s top executives have turned small biotechnology firms and Big Pharma corporations into vehicles for extracting wealth from the health care system, even as these ostensibly health-promoting companies deny access to millions of needy people at home and abroad and undermine the financial well-being of patients and payers."

Washington Monthly