Numlock Sunday: March 3, 2019

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Max Nisen of Bloomberg Opinion. Max covers pharmaceutical pricing and the health care business, and I wanted to chat with him about gene therapies, those new and wildly expensive ways that companies are treating challenging diseases.

We spoke about what’s wrong with American health care, what the potential of gene therapy really is, and why the current system isn’t engineered to cure diseases, it’s engineered to treat diseases.

Max can be found at Bloomberg, on Twitter and at his food newsletter Fresser.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Walt Hickey: Drugs are expensive. Why?

Max Nisen: Oh boy. In general or in the United States? Cause there's two different questions.

Let's start with in general.

All right. In a general economic sense, people ar…