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How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

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Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#251

Post by maxerickson »

Daishiman wrote: post #202
rayiner wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say we shut down Silicon Valley and had the government do computer research. You think that would be efficient and effective? At the end of the day, you need to give smart people a reason to make their lives' work saving lives instead of selling financial products or advertising algorithms. That's not going to happen if going into drug development means topping out at GS-15 in a government lab.

How funny that you mention that, given that the Internet, the very backbone upon so much of the economy moves around, started and developmed mostly as... a military project. Supported by universities and public research.

The market paid Cisco and the like to develop the ever advancing hardware that powers the internet as it exists today.

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#252

Post by gozur88 »

danjoc wrote: post #107
gozur88 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India can break patents on drugs it considers too expensive. The real danger is if this sort of thing makes drugs unprofitable pharma companies won't spend any money researching drugs to treat uncommon conditions, and the drug will never exist to start with. We'll get endless varieties of new opioids, blood pressure pills, pecker perkers, and not much else.

I always hear this argument, but never any evidence to back it up. Is it simply regurgitating econ 101? There must be some economic incentive? Any time people die from a disease, that alone creates an incentive for those left living to find a cure. What econ doesn't teach is that people are not perfectly rational creatures. Just like we will find people who will write code for free, who will make music for free, ther…

>There must be some economic incentive? Any time people die from a disease, that alone creates an incentive for those left living to find a cure.

No matter how altruistic you are, as a private company you can't put billions of dollars toward a drug that's going to lose money.

>I don't buy the argument that only Big Pharma who can deliver cures. As the article pointed out, Gilead didn't develop the cure. They bought the company that did.

... which they would not have done without the expectation of a profit.

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#253

Post by WalterBright »

Houshalter wrote: post #217
WalterBright wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if they demanded a trillion dollars per pill Then nobody would buy it and they would lose their investment. > force the government to pay it They can't force the government to do anything. Of course, the government can just take the pills from them, but if they did that, then no more cures would be developed. > people refuse to put an economic value on life People do all the time. Every time you (and everyone else)…

You missed the part where insurance companies and government programs are obligated to pay for treatment regardless of costs. A limit needs to be put on this. E.g. spending a million dollars on a treatment that is only decreases the risk of death by 5% puts a $20 mil value on life, which is too high. I don't know what the number should be, but it's something we need to decide.

> regardless of costs

Anything with that phrase in it inevitably leads to major problems, along with other phrases like "zero tolerance" and "safety always comes first".

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#254

Post by Hondor »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #132
tim333 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>large group of their employees to jump off their building all at once? Didn't happen at Foxconn. They were all on separate days over a few years. Not sure where you got "mass suicide" from. It's not mentioned in the comment you refer to.

Wait, this was apparently misreported to me although it still says wonders about the situation. It was a threatened mass suicide that led to concessions. Over a dozen did jump to death. And the worst part of what I originally received.... curtailing the suicides by installing safety nets instead of better working conditions... did happen. So, yes, that's unusually bad with not many in the U.S. that can compare. I'll…

My university started locking the balcony doors of its library building after a suicider jumped off. Nobody complained that they should have provided better studying conditions for students and left the doors open. It seemed like a completely sensible and thoughtful thing to do to prevent more suicides.

I've been inside Chinese factories and they seem just like factories anywhere else. Americans need to stop imagining China as some giant North Korean slave camp. It's got very low unemployment, a huge middle class and quite reasonable working hours, pay and job mobility, especially for young people like those Foxconn workers. Health and safety is a wash though but that's another matter.

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#255

Post by iofj »

chris_wot wrote: post #237
necessity wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drug from the original company is expensive everywhere, what India has is generics, which in their turn might lower the price of the original drug because of the competition. It also lowers the incentive of selling the original drug there at all (and consequently allowing the government to press for agreements). I have some unpopular opinions regarding the subject...

Actually, India basically refuses to recognise patents for a wide variety of pharmaceutical products. For a long time they refused to recognise patents for drugs that combat AIDS and a thriving market for generics sprung up. There was a lot of posturing and complaining by pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and the U.S. Government tried to heavy the Indian Government, but to no avail. When it became apparent that th…

This is one of the "problems" the TTIP attempts to "fix", isn't it ? That Indians get access to cheap medication.

https://donttradeourlivesaway.wordpress.com/2015/10/20/how-t...

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#256

Post by maxerickson »

hourislate wrote: post #94

I was under the impression most Pharma Companies will give it to you for free if you don't have insurance and can't afford it. Maybe it's different if you have insurance and they won't pay for it. The article is unfair mentioning Shkreli. He has always offered his drugs for free to anyone that couldn't afford them. It has always been his policy and continues to be so. I think it was the Insurers and their paid for Po…

It's not like insurance companies are paying that $750 a pill in a vacuum. They make those payments out of the premiums they collect.

Shkreli may not have been screwing the poor, but that doesn't mean he wasn't screwing everyone else.

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#257

Post by ChrisLTD »

phaemon wrote: post #230
KaiserPro wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if western governments stop enforcing drug development intellectual rights? No new drugs. Pretty simple. Now you ask, is that a bad thing? well yes, yes it is. Right now, we are running out of (or have run out of) top end antibiotics. Partly from over use (I'm looking at you America.) mostly from using them to get much higher yields in farm animals (yup, thats right, last line antibiotics are being used on pig…

> No new drugs. Pretty simple. I doubt that. There's no reason why the same research couldn't be academic research. Global spending on drugs research is only $77 billion a year. Take the 20 richest countries in the world and that's less than $4 billion a year each. That's less than half the UK's EU rebate. (EDIT: not enough coffee to add correctly)

Bingo. The private profit motive isn't the only way to get things done. Two of the greatest scientific and engineering feats of the 20th century, the atom bomb and landing on the moon, were both government run and funded.

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#259

Post by option_greek »

voodootrucker wrote: post #18
surrealvortex wrote: post #8

I'm conflicted about this article. On the one hand, the pharmaceutical companies gouging ordinary Americans is abominable. Doing something to circumvent their greed is something to support. On the other hand, if enough people exploit loopholes like this, and the pharma company actually felt a significant drain in revenue, they may decide not to license the manufacture of these drugs in India at lower prices. If $84,0…

So it's fair for a multi-billion dollar company to exploit the "global market" by farming work out to 3rd world countries... But not for a customer who is literally dying to take advantage of that same "global market" to save himself? Like everything else in the global economy, laws are only enforced to protect the strong against the weak, and yet we wonder how all the wealth is accumulating in the hands of the few.

That's a very interesting point! Is also applicable to digital content restrictions (pricing differences).

Re: How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

#260

Post by cheiVia0 »

mgiannopoulos wrote: post #140
corvallis wrote: post #122

Something to keep in mind is the population that typically has chronic Hep C requiring this drug. It's IV drug users who share needles. Think they have $84K? Nope. Think they have insurance? Nope. Guess who pays for it. Oh that's right, it's Medicaid! It's you, the taxpayers. Where is there a large concentration of people that have Hep C? Prisons. Guess who pays for it then? Still you! The prison systems are obligate…

So India does not have prisons or similar laws for treatment of prisoners?

Incarceration rate (Prisoners per 100,000 population):

United States: 698

India: 33

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

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