The cost of medicines: Group aims to cut drug prices

IT is very difficult to balance the attraction and the high cost of a revolutionary drug that may or may not help a patient with the wider obligations of those responsible for service resources. 

That is especially so, and emotional if you are the patient whose treatment is predicated by value-for-money equations. The views of those trapped on a long waiting list for relatively cheap treatment while drugs costing multiples of their needs are supplied to individuals are no less fraught.

So too are the views provoked by comparing the cost of medicines in Ireland with the cost of those drugs in other European Union countries. It does not take too long to establish that though the EU may be many things it is not a single market. The cost of some drugs in Ireland is, inexplicably, far higher than it is in other EU member states.