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How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

theatlantic.com

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Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#81

Post by bradleyjg »

DennisP wrote: post #66
bradleyjg wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "your money or your life" > (I've heard quotes in the 100's of K even in the 1-2 M) The thing is that no one+ has that kind of money. So it ends being your money or his life, over and over again. This has long since moved from the space of individual decision making to public policy. But we in the United States refuse to face up to that. We like to pretend that the doctor and patient should be the only ones that ha…

That's what insurance is for . When you buy insurance you're making an agreement to socialize risk, so you're never faced with a $1M bill to save your life.

Health insurance, despite the name, isn’t insurance.

Insurance is paying small sums, at EV negative cost, to mitigate the risk from a rare but very expensive cost.

Health insurance isn’t underwritten and pays out for routine expenses. It isn’t insurance.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#82

Post by pfdietz »

amelius wrote: post #73
0815test wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. But they focus on the earliest stages of drug development, mostly involving proofs of concept. That doesn't solve the problem of actually getting the drug approved so that it can be used by patients - which is where the costs skyrocket.

> They do. But they focus on the earliest stages of drug development, mostly involving proofs of concept. If that is true, then how can BigPharma patent the drugs?

Drugs are tweaked during development. The initial candidate compound is more for proving that a particular class of drugs has promise. But tweaking for toxicity, effectiveness, etc. can only be fully done in clinical trials.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#83

Post by naasking »

scotty79 wrote: post #74

When the question is stated like that it becomes really questionable whether cost of drugs should have anything to do with drug research cost. Those two things look like they should be completely separate, done by separate entities with separate funding.

Should the cost of CPUs be separate from the cost of CPU research? I understand it seems distasteful to place a cost on health and life, but isn't that just a reality? Everything has a cost. As long as the cost of drugs were reasonable, we wouldn't need to have these conversations.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#84

Post by PeterisP »

michaelscott wrote: post #72
0815test wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. But they focus on the earliest stages of drug development, mostly involving proofs of concept. That doesn't solve the problem of actually getting the drug approved so that it can be used by patients - which is where the costs skyrocket.

As a non-American, why do costs skyrocket in the approval phase? Is it that the drugs have to go through multiple rounds of clinical testing over years? I struggle to understand the astronomical price tags, but I'm assuming it's something bureaucratic?

Part of the reason is not bureaucratic but that clinical testing simply takes enormous amounts of labor, since you need to do it at a large scale.

Alternatively, you could say that the requirement to do that much clinical testing is an arbitrary bureaucratic decision and could be lowered - but there are political reasons (e.g. thalidomide) to err on the side of caution even if extra testing saves less lives than it costs lives because of the delays.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#85

Post by PeterisP »

Brakenshire wrote: post #79
scotty79 wrote: post #74

When the question is stated like that it becomes really questionable whether cost of drugs should have anything to do with drug research cost. Those two things look like they should be completely separate, done by separate entities with separate funding.

I think the reason you want them connected is the ability to channel private capital towards achieving medical progress. If there is a disease which costs the general population tens of billions of dollars a year, either in providing healthcare or in an inability to carry on a normal life, work, look after yourself and so on, then there is an inherent and huge pot of money which can go to solving the problem. If you…

Furthermore, you could pretty much forget about funding for socially/politically unpopular diseases - I can certainly imagine some voters rabidly requesting their representatives that HIV drugs shouldn't be funded at all because God's punishment should be allowed to take its course.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#86

Post by pbhjpbhj »

RHSeeger wrote: post #76
Nf508 wrote: post #64

Interestingly in the case of the the Abiraterone example used in the article, none of the R&D was even done by JNJ. The original work was done at The Institute of Cancer Research, an academic/charity drug discovery institute. JNJ actually only market this drug because of acquisitions rather than R&D efforts. Which is the way that a lot of pharma is going these days, letting smaller biotechs take the high risk of deve…

I don't buy that argument. It's like saying I should sell something I bought at the store for free, because I didn't pay the cost to make it directly (someone else did, and I paid them). The research had to be done, and JNJ bought the company that did it. The price they had to pay was impacted by the cost of the research.

But if the product you're selling in your store was made using charity? Or gifted you by the government? then high prices couldn't be justified by R&D costs.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#88

Post by Amygaz »

tcbawo wrote: post #68
DennisP wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what insurance is for . When you buy insurance you're making an agreement to socialize risk, so you're never faced with a $1M bill to save your life.

Until it costs $1 millions for everyone, then the system breaks down. Every actor is trying to make as much as they can before the music stops.

Why would it cost $1M for everyone? Not everyone has a disease or an accident. And if we were all greatly diseased at the same time, the price tag would be the least of our worry.

Re: How expensive do prescription drugs need to be to fund research?

#90

Post by rejschaap »

bradleyjg wrote: post #81
DennisP wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what insurance is for . When you buy insurance you're making an agreement to socialize risk, so you're never faced with a $1M bill to save your life.

Health insurance, despite the name, isn’t insurance. Insurance is paying small sums, at EV negative cost, to mitigate the risk from a rare but very expensive cost. Health insurance isn’t underwritten and pays out for routine expenses. It isn’t insurance.

I think you are trying to say it is more than an insurance, because it also pays out for routine expenses?
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