UID:
almahu_9949890647002882
Format:
1 online resource (217 pages)
Edition:
1st ed.
ISBN:
9780520388727
Content:
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.
Note:
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Chronology of Key Events -- Preface -- Introduction -- Risk, Value, and the Politics of Justification in the Drug Affordability Crisis -- Diagnostic Blind Spots in the Price of a Cure -- The Missing Diagnosis: Financialization -- Opening the Black Box of Price and Value: Capital, Assets, and Power -- A Sociological Account: The Case of Sofosbuvir-Based Treatments -- Chapter Outlines -- 1. Capitalizing Science -- Overcoming a Technological Hurdle: The Replicon Tool and an Entrepreneurial State -- The Triple Helix: Public and Private Science in the Launch of Pharmasset -- Sofosbuvir as an Asset and a Relay Race of Financialized Capital -- Pharm(asset) -- 2. Capitalizing Drugs -- Life Science amid Shareholder Power -- Chasing the Golden Snitch, and a Hepatitis C Gold Rush -- The Cannibalizing Company: Following Gilead's Hepatitis C Money -- From R& -- D to M& -- A and Buybacks -- 3. Capitalizing Health -- Health as a Financial Asset: Setting and Justifying a 1,000-a-day Price for a Cure -- Rationing versus Public Health: The Politics of Value and the Crisis of Treatment Access -- The Patient Cliff: The Limits of a Cure as an Asset -- Pharma(value) -- 4. From Financialization to Public Purpose for Health -- When Medicines are Financialized: Mechanisms, Mystifications, and Outcomes -- Toward a Public-Purpose System -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index.
Additional Edition:
Print version: Roy, Victor Capitalizing a Cure Berkeley : University of California Press,c2023 ISBN 9780520388710
Language:
English
Keywords:
Electronic books.
