There are many other advantages of HIE. For example, one method commonly used for evaluating drug pricing is QALYs, or Quality-Adjusted Life Years. 1 QALY means another year of perfect health (or 2 years at 50%). Cancer drugs can command high prices because the difference between dying and living another 20 years in good health is alot in QALYs.
However, many neuro development disorders are not directly life threatening. Certainly the quality of life for those years is not high, but Daybue isn't converting a 20% 'quality of life' into 80% either.
Daybue also has significant side effects.
In other words, in a pure QALYs calculation Daybue might not come out that well.
But if you want the strongest cost-benefit QALYS you couldnt do better than HIE. These are newborns who are initially in perfect health (mostly), but due to birth complications are now facing either death or lifetime disability. If you can successfully treat many of them you could get 80%-100% QALYS x 75 year normal life expectancy.
A drug that can save a newborn babies life and preserve full health after a birth complication is arguably the most valuable drug you could ever do a cost benefit calculation for.
What does this mean? It means in the absence of any alternative treatments (which there aren't really) you could justify a very high price. My analysis suggests it could be well over $1 million per acute treatment.
QALYs are commonly valued at $100,000 to $150,000 per QALYS. Note Daybue is priced way over this...
But a newborn baby that doesn't die but lives a healthy 75 year lifespan. That's $7.5 - $10 million. Not every baby would otherwise die of course, but you get the idea (Note that the death rate is still substantial though).
And how many insurance companies are going to deny funding for a treatment that can save a newborn babies life? 'Sorry, your babys life isn't worth enough for us to pay... '.
(20min delay)