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Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

arstechnica.com

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Re: Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

#31

Post by refurb »

programmertote wrote: post #14
refurb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to note that this case is for generic drugs, not brand name drugs. The expensive drugs that make the news are generally the branded kind. Generic drugs are usually very cheap due to the level of competition. Interestingly, the US has some of the cheapest generic drug prices in the world due to the level of competition. I had read that for some generic companies, they make almost 100% of their profit by…

Can you please share where you read that "the US has some of the cheapest generic drug prices"? My mom, who lives in a southeast asian country, came to visit me in the US last month and I asked her to buy generic antibiotics; ear drops; artificial tear drops; generic antihistamines; and they all are much cheaper than what I would have paid here (and are equally effective in a way that I've been weathering fine in thi…

I should clarify that with "cheaper generic drug prices compared to other western countries".

By comparison, the United States has historically had low generic drug prices and high rates of generic drug use (84% in 2013), but has in recent years experienced sharp price increases for some off‐patent products.[1]

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5594322/

Re: Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

#32

Post by otikik »

Bartweiss wrote: post #22
programmertote wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please share where you read that "the US has some of the cheapest generic drug prices"? My mom, who lives in a southeast asian country, came to visit me in the US last month and I asked her to buy generic antibiotics; ear drops; artificial tear drops; generic antihistamines; and they all are much cheaper than what I would have paid here (and are equally effective in a way that I've been weathering fine in thi…

This is a complicated one: US generics are vastly more expensive than international generics, but at least part of that is because US manufacturers sell those drugs abroad at the cost of production, making up their remaining costs in the US. People in the industry have described it to me as a tactic of "we help people in need, please don't regulate us". This isn't the whole story; east Asian manufacturers also produc…

> US manufacturers sell those drugs abroad at the cost of production

Not everyone agrees with that statement.

First of all, purchasing negotiations are all secret. US manufactures could very well be saying one thing, and doing another.

Donald Trump said something along those lines some time ago, calling EU "Freeloaders". There is a Wall Street Journal article echoing his comments.

Here's an answer from EU's Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis:

https://sciencebusiness.net/news/drug-prices-row-eu-health-c...

tl;dr: according to him, Trump was just lying.

Re: Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

#34

Post by Bartweiss »

otikik wrote: post #32
Bartweiss wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a complicated one: US generics are vastly more expensive than international generics, but at least part of that is because US manufacturers sell those drugs abroad at the cost of production, making up their remaining costs in the US. People in the industry have described it to me as a tactic of "we help people in need, please don't regulate us". This isn't the whole story; east Asian manufacturers also produc…

> US manufacturers sell those drugs abroad at the cost of production Not everyone agrees with that statement. First of all, purchasing negotiations are all secret. US manufactures could very well be saying one thing, and doing another. Donald Trump said something along those lines some time ago, calling EU "Freeloaders". There is a Wall Street Journal article echoing his comments. Here's an answer from EU's Health Co…

I should have been clearer about "abroad"; I didn't mean Europe. Trump is referencing the claim that Americans pay for drug development and Europe gets cheap products from it, which is dubious at best. And I don't think US-developed medicines are being sold at-cost there, even if they are cheaper.

What I'm talking about is medicines that are donated, sold with differential pricing, or assigned 'voluntary licenses' to increase medical access in underdeveloped countries. Voluntary license medicines are required to be produced with substantially different appearances from their developed-nation analogues, specifically so that they won't be exported back to undercut those products.

All of those programs are fundamentally good things which save lives, but they lead to some pretty strange outcomes and in turn strange reporting. It can be vastly cheaper to obtain a medicine in an underdeveloped country with supply shortages than in the first world, and that sometimes also prompts articles saying that such-and-such a medicine "only costs 10 cents in other countries!" As far as I know, this is mostly an issue in the US; most other high-differential-price countries have socialized healthcare or other functional solutions like Singapore's, but the US has a lot of extremely poor people who end up paying much higher prices than equally impoverished people abroad.

https://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/documents/s17815en/s17815e...

Re: Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

#35

Post by deogeo »

tolstoshev wrote: post #33

Fuck em - just buy overseas knock offs. If they're going to abuse the system I have no qualms about abusing it as well. China is happy to make generic knock-offs and sell them at a fair market price.

That a person buying medicine for personal use from abroad could be considered 'abuse', just goes to show how sickeningly skewed in favor of corporations the system is.

There was recently a story on HN of a journalist's home raided to identify his source. Perhaps that is the kind of system abuse that is called for - sending SWAT teams to the homes of each of the CEOs, board-members, and major shareholders, and ransacking them for any signs of wrongdoing, while holding the accused in handcuffs.

It happens every day to regular people for non-violent crimes in the US. Why should the rich have a different law-enforcement system? Yet this call for equal treatment sounds almost extremist...

Re: Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

#36

Post by jonhendry18 »

throwaway55554 wrote: post #6

> "We have hard evidence that shows the generic drug industry perpetrated a multi-billion dollar fraud on the American people,"... So, force them to reset prices. Don't slap them on the wrists with easily paid fines. Make them reset prices.

Any fines should be per-share. Like $10 per share or whatever. That's the only way a fine is going to make any difference.

Re: Drugmakers hiked prices 1k% in price-fixing scheme, states allege

#37

Post by ptah »

Bartweiss wrote: post #26
ptah wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is a very elementary idea that applies to few real life markets. things are more complicated than what your learn in basic economics

> applies to few real life markets It applies to almost all real-life markets. It's so standard that we don't even notice it happening, and focus on the exceptions. There is no level of economics you can reach where "competition drives down prices" stops being taken seriously; Nobel-winning left-wing economists like Stiglitz and Krugman accept that as true and relevant. So does Marx(!), who focuses on how lower costs…

In almost all markets competition produces pressure towards consolidation and monopolization. You need strong regulation to keep things competitive
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