This is an article written by the biggest fan of a guy with an inflated ego, a child-like view of the world, and nothing to show.
An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
131–140 of 286 posts
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#132Related: If you want to understand how and why the American Healthcare system is broken, read the excellent book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of medicine I require to be functional enough to hold down a job has risen so much that the copay is the equivalent of the entire out-of-pocket cost from a few years ago. The medication was discovered in 1969. The application method, which is the shitty excuse for the patents protecting its $2,200/month price tag, was first approved for use by the FDA in 1979. The drug has been for sale in it's current form…
I am astonished that a couple of the biggest insurance companies in the US haven't banded together to form a drug manufacturing co-op. Find stuff that's off-patent and build generics for things like epi-pens. The best bit (to my thinking) is after doing this to just a few drugs, the insurance companies would have a very big negotiating stick to go after other companies pricing off-patent drugs way over cost. If I kne…
> Find stuff that's off-patent and build generics
Indian pharma industry is mostly doing these. We export a lot of generics to other continents as well.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#134> “To deny someone access to a lifesaving medication is murder,” he said. And “an act of theft [of intellectual property] to prevent an act of murder is morally acceptable.” I agree with the conclusion, but for a different reason. "Theft" is the wrong way to think about IP. The economic function of IP is not to protect producers from consumers, but to protect producers from free-riding by other producers.[1] Thus, fo…
I have to disagree on both counts: 1) Preserving a reliable institution of private property is also a "public goods problem", and thieves (of physical goods) are free-riding in a very analogous sense (disrupting the very system that enables the production of things-worth-stealing). That free-riding is exactly what makes piracy intuitively feel like theft. 2) Enabling the down-low production of a drug does disrupt the…
Are these outcomes you describe actually bad? While I believe in the rule of law, the fact is that law has been bent to serve the wealthy and powerful.
Perhaps such lawbreaking is simply the symptom of the disease as Dr. Prasad says, which is (patent laws that allow current) drug pricing.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#135That seems both super dangerous, and super awesome. It's not something that we should have to consider. But this is the world we live in, now; legitimate supply lines of life-saving medicine have collapsed for a fair number of people. I understand why people might be troubled by someone actively going out and advocating this as opposed to simply making the information available, but if you're offered medicine with 95…
The cost of medicine I require to be functional enough to hold down a job has risen so much that the copay is the equivalent of the entire out-of-pocket cost from a few years ago. The medication was discovered in 1969. The application method, which is the shitty excuse for the patents protecting its $2,200/month price tag, was first approved for use by the FDA in 1979. The drug has been for sale in it's current form…
Is it not possible to order a generic from India or another country? The drug should be out of patent a long while already?
If no competitor is available, why doesn't anyone set it up? It looks like a great startup opportunity.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of medicine I require to be functional enough to hold down a job has risen so much that the copay is the equivalent of the entire out-of-pocket cost from a few years ago. The medication was discovered in 1969. The application method, which is the shitty excuse for the patents protecting its $2,200/month price tag, was first approved for use by the FDA in 1979. The drug has been for sale in it's current form…
Is it not possible to order a generic from India or another country? The drug should be out of patent a long while already? If no competitor is available, why doesn't anyone set it up? It looks like a great startup opportunity.
Import laws exist to prevent this specific scenario.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#137That seems both super dangerous, and super awesome. It's not something that we should have to consider. But this is the world we live in, now; legitimate supply lines of life-saving medicine have collapsed for a fair number of people. I understand why people might be troubled by someone actively going out and advocating this as opposed to simply making the information available, but if you're offered medicine with 95…
The cost of medicine I require to be functional enough to hold down a job has risen so much that the copay is the equivalent of the entire out-of-pocket cost from a few years ago. The medication was discovered in 1969. The application method, which is the shitty excuse for the patents protecting its $2,200/month price tag, was first approved for use by the FDA in 1979. The drug has been for sale in it's current form…
The next Mickey Monday won't be flying cocaine he'll be flying in life saving basic meds from India.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it not possible to order a generic from India or another country? The drug should be out of patent a long while already? If no competitor is available, why doesn't anyone set it up? It looks like a great startup opportunity.
Import laws exist to prevent this specific scenario.
[deleted]
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#139That seems both super dangerous, and super awesome. It's not something that we should have to consider. But this is the world we live in, now; legitimate supply lines of life-saving medicine have collapsed for a fair number of people. I understand why people might be troubled by someone actively going out and advocating this as opposed to simply making the information available, but if you're offered medicine with 95…
The cost of medicine I require to be functional enough to hold down a job has risen so much that the copay is the equivalent of the entire out-of-pocket cost from a few years ago. The medication was discovered in 1969. The application method, which is the shitty excuse for the patents protecting its $2,200/month price tag, was first approved for use by the FDA in 1979. The drug has been for sale in it's current form…
If the drug is out of patent and it is very profitable, why doesn't anyone set up a company to manufacture and sell it cheaper in the US?
Same question with epipen.
Re: An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds
#140We used to have government-funded research programs at universities, now we have for-profit big pharma which by definition creates treatments that cost more. It could be argued that this was by design. So open sourcing cures like this is a natural free market reaction to that. Since most of the cost of any new medication today is research, we should decouple that cost from production. The main reason this doesn't hap…
The NIH budget, the largest US government funder of medical research, is bigger now than at any time before 2000 (although it's down a bit from the 2003 peak, adjusting for inflation). Source: https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/NIHMech_1.jpg
Thank you, if that's true then I stand corrected. Something to consider though is the NIH is under constant threat of cuts which might discourage going deep on hard problems:
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/16/52039014...
Also $30 billion is only 0.75% of the projected $4 trillion federal budget for next year. Just percentage-wise this seems like something that should be low on the list for cuts.