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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.
Open Access
Capitalizing a Cure How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines
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Reviews
"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
"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“Victor Roy meticulously examines the value extraction that lies at the heart of today’s pharmaceutical industry. An important voice on the links between finance and health ecosystems, Roy’s new book is a valuable contribution to building an economy that is based on providing health for all."—Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything and Chair of the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All
"This book is a riveting read that will strike fear in the heart of anybody who cares about the right to health or thinks that the drive for profit should not supersede democracy or human need. It exposes why the price tags on medicines are so high and what the systems are that keep it that way."—Salmaan Keshavjee, author of Blind Spot: How Neoliberalism Infiltrated Global Health
"This is the best piece of nonfiction I have read in a long time. This book offers a fantastic, relevant, and necessary case study to understand how the financialization of the economy has affected the organization of industrial sectors by focusing on what has happened in the biopharmaceutical sector."—Marc-André Gagnon, Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy, Carleton University
“Capitalizing a Cure debunks several myths used to justify today’s pharmaceutical business model and shows how the purpose of improving people’s health gets lost in the machinations of financialized capitalism. An eye-opener for scholars and policymakers seeking to reform our medical innovation ecosystem.”—Els Torreele, former Director of the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign and Visiting Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
“This book sheds light on an underappreciated yet critical driver of spiraling medicines prices: who finances pharmaceutical R&D, how, and why. Roy's careful excavation of the story behind breakthrough hepatitis C treatments is essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of ensuring everyone can benefit from scientific progress.”—Suerie Moon, Co-Director at the Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute
“What is the price of a drug? Does it represent profit, value, or the person who might benefit from a curative medicine? Roy’s book is a brilliant inspection of these dynamic concepts that helps us understand the decisions we are making as a society through drug pricing.”—Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS, Professor of Medicine and Public Health, Yale University
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“Capitalizing a Cure debunks several myths used to justify today’s pharmaceutical business model and shows how the purpose of improving people’s health gets lost in the machinations of financialized capitalism. An eye-opener for scholars and policymakers seeking to reform our medical innovation ecosystem.”—Els Torreele, former Director of the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign and Visiting Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
“This book sheds light on an underappreciated yet critical driver of spiraling medicines prices: who finances pharmaceutical R&D, how, and why. Roy's careful excavation of the story behind breakthrough hepatitis C treatments is essential reading for anyone interested in the challenge of ensuring everyone can benefit from scientific progress.”—Suerie Moon, Co-Director at the Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute
“What is the price of a drug? Does it represent profit, value, or the person who might benefit from a curative medicine? Roy’s book is a brilliant inspection of these dynamic concepts that helps us understand the decisions we are making as a society through drug pricing.”—Joseph S. Ross, MD, MHS, Professor of Medicine and Public Health, Yale University
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