221–230 of 461 posts
Drug creation needs to be nationalized, 100% tax funded all the way from researcher to trials to manufacture, and the drugs sold at cost thereafter. And the pharmaceuticals industry needs to just go away.
India makes 80% of the generic drugs used around the world.
If US hospital administrators are paying $750 a tablet, it sounds like the Indians have not bothered to apply for sales approval in the USA due to the low profit margin.
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It seems to me that the overall result would be other companies start manufacturing the generic and sell the drug for maybe 20% less than Martin and over time the price drops back down towards where it once started. In the meantime, this company either goes bankrupt or is sold off. Or the government passes a law capping how much you can raise the price of a generic drug over so many years.
That's the loophole though, the quantities are so small that realistically, no pharmaceutical company has the incentive to make their version of the drug, even at $750 per dose. There are still costs to making a drug that's off-patent, and sometimes the number of patients being treated is only in the double digits. Additionally, a competing drug released at say, $500 per dose would still be considered predatory anywa…
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So you're saying that "jack up the prices to wring more money out of dying people that don't have any other choice" is a perfectly valid, 100% ethical business decision that every single person on the face of the planet should be able to make without any hesitation? Seems like a specious argument.
I think that it's a perfectly valid solution to the problem of being a business or corporation of making more money. I think it's a mistake to believe that ethics is a big part of that equation and I think history backs me up on that. For sure, I'd like these organizations to be more ethical but I also understand that can often get in the way of their primary goal, which is make more money. I don't believe it's ethic…
Yeah, so it also used to be merely unethical to lie about your business' finances. Its illegal now. Ethics IS a big part of the equation. In fact ethics have been integrated into the laws themselves.
>history backs me up on that
What? History also "backs you up" that exterminating an entire group of people is "valid".
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It's way down there in the article, but Turing's distributor (Impax) is tampering with the generic approval process. They use a controlled distribution strategy where you need to buy it directly from them, and they won't sell it to anyone who uses it for approval testing. Without the namebrand drug, there's no way to prove that your generic is equally efficacious, and thus no generic approvals and no competition.
Why can't you just go to a doctor or hospital and pay them a couple grand per pill and use that? Nobody has to know where you got it from...
It should be pretty obvious by now that the pharma sector is completely out of control. Again and again I read about the rising cost of healthcare, how we can't afford to support an aging society, and now even "solved" problems are used to squeeze even more profits from those who can afford the least. And I'm not talking about the US, this is a world wide problem. Instead of making international treaties that make en…
Yet people are still quick to say "...but what about Big Pharma?" when there's a discussion about abolishing patents. I don't know if patents should be abolished completely, but if there's a discussion about a serious patent reform, we should stop considering pharmaceuticals as some kind of exception, and apply the new reform equally to everyone, instead of allowing exceptions for Big Pharma, or worse, watering down…
I am a fund manager and I have followed Martin Shkreli since his prior company, Retrophin, went public about two years ago. Simply put, Martin is a sociopathic criminal with a well-established, and consistent track record of deceit, recklessness, failure, and just plain old stupidity. But he is also hyper-aggressive. He is currently living in Switzerland, and it's my understanding that he fled the country in order to…
I like the fact that HN is a particularly civil place - it's in the guidelines. Now granted, AVG or Martin Shkreli aren't a member of the HN community in a very narrow sense (though I'm sure AVG engineers read it), unlike a startup founder. But I would appreciate it if you would hedge your statements, lead with the facts, and make them subjective.
It may sound like reserved understatement if you do so, but people here know how to read between the lines. I don't object to any of the facts you've presented, in fact your view is appreciated here, and you don't have to be "neutral", you're not Wikipedia.
I just wish you would take a moment and phrase it more carefully. HN has a rule, no gratuitious negativity, and civil discourse. (Again I'd like to emphasize that I enjoyed reading your take and the facts you've presented.)
EDIT: This comment is now at -4. I'm sorry, downvoters are not following HN policy. "Simply put, Martin is a sociopathic criminal with a well-established, and consistent track record of deceit, recklessness, failure, and just plain old stupidity" without references, and "In all my years of investing, he is one of the most unique scumbags I've ever come across" is extremely inflammatory. As you can see from the number of replies that it has generated. We don't need to make HN reddit.
The facts speak for themselves - when they're presented.
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Why can't you just go to a doctor or hospital and pay them a couple grand per pill and use that? Nobody has to know where you got it from...
You'd need a prescription to get it. And I don't believe it's legal for a person with the prescription to sell or give prescribed medicine to other other people.
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It really isn't comparable. Computers are tools. Drugs are health. They are a public good and a natural human right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Mixing them up like the USA system does is a category error.
They are a public good and a natural human right. No they aren't. Saying that is equivalent to saying that you would be justified in putting a gun to a chemist's head and forcing him to make a drug for you even if he didn't want to. But there's no reason to say that your "right" to a drug trumps his right to be free from threat of violence and denial of agency. What you're talking about is more of an entitlement than…
Even from a selfish perspective, public health is so crammed with positive externalities it pays for itself.
Nobody's going to force chemists to make drugs. Instead the way tax works is that you force everyone to pay a fraction of their productivity into a fund that gets spent paying the chemist to make drugs, the pharmacist to deliver them, etc. It's very similar to insurance except that it doesn't have the perverse motivation to deny you care, and it's compulsory because a civilized society values people not writhing in pain and dying from uncured curable disease more highly than losing a fraction of their time working for the state to prevent it.
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Thanks for the explanation. But this rule - ie, not allowing the competitor to buy the original product for testing - is incredibly anti-competitive and should be banned.
Or, you know, you could remove the stupid regulations around generics. I trust Bayer is capable of copying some crappy 60-year-old drug without the FDA taking 6 months to approve it.
Yes, Bayer is capable, but like many companies, they also have people in their facilities that try to cut corners to make themselves look good. Passing the FDA review is fairly straightforward.
[1] http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/u...