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Comment by viccis | Hacker News Reader

When my wife needed a rabies post-exposure shot course, it would have been around $25000 range for the shots without coverage. Our (expensive high end) insurance brought it down to "only" $2500 out of pocket for us. The alternative is to take the gamble of a possible horrible death.

In the UK? Around £150-£300 total.

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> In the UK? Around £150-£300 total.

For whom? I can't imagine this in particular would not be free at the point of use like almost everything else. That said, the UK has famously been free of (classical) rabies since the 1920s, so it's unclear if it would be easily available if there aren't other uses.

Was talking about from a private clinic [1]. Obviously it's free via NHS. It's a good example of a system in which the government in incentivized to not tolerate drug price gouging.

https://www.citydoc.org.uk/conditions/rabies

Not quite free for most people, we have to pay the prescription charge of about £12

Most dispensed _items_ are free of charge (as in, the prescription charge is not paid - only around ~11% of items are paid). There isn't enough data to know how that breaks down to people though.

Not in Northern Ireland weirdly, they have free prescriptions there

Is it a good example of drug price gouging? I would bet the major part of the price is that provider.

Yes, it's the drug.

So what's the breakdown of that $25k for the provider?

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