281–290 of 461 posts
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/clintons-tweet-high-drug-price...
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Why do poor business decisions make a case for nationalization?
I have re-read your comment a dozen times, trying to grasp what you mean, and come up short each time. Are you a sociopath?
Please also review the Hacker News Guidelines.[1]
>Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
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Well, in the US, we have the Veterans Administration and Indian Health Service doing a poor job and wasting a lot of money and are unreliable.
Part of that failure is political. People don't want them to work because they prefer markets do it. A great example of this in action is the silly Post Office pre pay benefit requrement. It's making the Post Office look really bad because they appear to not have enough to operate. The truth is they operate just fine, and are self-funded. Congress changed rate structures and imposed prepament of multiple decades of b…
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Even though it's $750 per dose now, since they have exclusive control over the market they could decrease it to whatever whenever they wanted to starve competitors.. probably after said competitors have invested in doing it.
This is a possible strategy, but is rarely used, as it is very risky (, it is likely to cost a great deal of market share in the long term). I have looked into it, and found very few examples of a company which tried to lure a competitor into a market, then under-sell them. The opposite (under-sell competition to gain market share then hike prices) also appears to be quite unpopular in the real market, for the opposi…
Both companies might be profitable on a marginal cost basis at $20/dose, but only the incumbent would be profitable on an average cost basis.
Because of this looming (unstated) threat, a competitor chooses to avoid the market.
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…
If this was done slowly, it could be an extremely effective strategy. Not too different from what Berkshire did with See's Candies. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/07/13/warren-buff...
1. No one dies if they don't get See's Candies
2. There are other chocolates out there
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From an economic and policy perspective, unfortunately, Turing is doing everything right. This is an economically misguided point of view. Free market decision-making can only be argued to be optimal in a free market system, which pharma is not, a distinction which the decision-makers certainly were intelligent enough to understand. Free market mechanisms either need to be put in place, or we need to stop allowing it…
I'm not sure I understand the point about economics being about utility vs. wealth. If its free market then aren't people free to choose between utility vs. wealth and in such case pure free market don't have much defense against a few sciopaths trampling all over the not so sociopaths?
Let's invent a system that makes explicit the choice of dollars over human lives, and let's call that "the free market".
And of course, since freedom is one of those ideas that, in popular use, has been oversimplified to uselessness (e.g. freedom is good, more freedom is more good, without nuance), this "free market" thing sounds like inevitably good--the more freedom, the better, right?
Even if it makes us uncomfortable, how can you say no to the "free market"? Even if, as you yourself seem to acknowledge is vulnerable to sociopathic manipulation, if (some, maybe only a few, maybe even those sociopaths) people want to build a system that normalizes choosing dollars over lives, how can you resist the "free market"?
Easy: it's all human inventions, and I for one don't want sociopaths telling me how to build an economy.
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Because then you don't have an audit trail to use in your study documentation.
I meant the manufacturer doesn't have to know (so they can't take revenge on the doctor/hospital). You can still have a hush-hush audit trail. Why is the original drug required anyways? Can't you prove it's the same without it? The details are all there in the public patent.
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This is a possible strategy, but is rarely used, as it is very risky (, it is likely to cost a great deal of market share in the long term). I have looked into it, and found very few examples of a company which tried to lure a competitor into a market, then under-sell them. The opposite (under-sell competition to gain market share then hike prices) also appears to be quite unpopular in the real market, for the opposi…
caseysoftware's argument is not that they're trying to lure a competitor into the market, but rather the threat that, upon spending all the money to reverse-engineer the drug and enter the market, the incumbent could drop its price to $20/dose and the new entrant would be stranded with no way to recover their NRE costs in an economically relevant timeframe. Both companies might be profitable on a marginal cost basis…
If you believe that the eventual average cost would prevent a new entrant, the new entrant would have to know (or believe that there was a high probability of) the entrenched producer would cut prices upon the second producer's entry. I do not find this to be particularly likely. In any case, the first producer would be betting on the likelyhood of the second producer's estimation of the likelyhood of a downward price change by the first. This strains credulity (, in my view).[1] I think that if anything, your argument proves too much, as no company would even enter a competitive market if what you describe is the case.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanoff_and_Juliet_(play)
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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…
plus big pharma doesn't do R&D: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ma-set-replace-rd-pharma-zach...
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…
If this was done slowly, it could be an extremely effective strategy. Not too different from what Berkshire did with See's Candies. http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/07/13/warren-buff...