My wife, a pharmacist, would be interested in exactly what drug you're using. Currently, she's on Avonex, and yes, without our insurance, the price would be ruinous.

Research on drugs is sometimes done in universities, sometimes with tax money. The immense cost of pushing a drug through the byzantine FDA approval process, hundreds of millions of dollars in many cases, is borne solely by the drug companies.

And they don't get their money back if it fails.

That being said, one has to admit that most drug companies don't seem to be exactly poverty-stricken.

Still, one wonders what drug costs would be like if the approval process was more streamlined, and more concerned with simple safety, instead of something as nebulous as efficacy. One also wonders what drug costs would be like without the lawsuit attorneys circling around the companies like vultures.

One also wonders if drug prices would be as high as they were if the market process was not short-circuited by insurance and other methods of shielding the drug from the effects of price and demand.

Useless speculation, of course. The free market has been largely burned out of our medical system years ago.