QLT INC. Vancouver, Canada; The News Here Is Good, Then Bad, Then Good.(THE NEW AMERICA)

Byline: AMY REEVES

The good thing about making medicine for elderly Americans is that your client base is only going to get bigger.

On the other hand, most of them depend on the government to pay their medical bills.

QLT Inc. has seen both the good and the bad side of that dependency lately. Its sole product, Visudyne, treats wet-age-related macular degeneration, or AMD. In this ailment, leaky blood vessels form in the back of the retina, blurring the central part of the vision field.

Some 500,000 new cases turn up worldwide each year -- 200,000 in North America alone. This has kept Visudyne's revenue growing since it hit the market in 2000.

Though QLT is based in Canada and Visudyne is approved in more than 60 countries, the U.S. provides two-thirds of its revenue. Much of the product's sales are reimbursed by Medicare.

Those numbers are set to increase. On Thursday, the U.S. government decided to expand Medicaid reimbursement to cover two other kinds of AMD, known as "occult" and "minimally classic" types.