How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
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How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
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Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#2Pharma strikes me as one of the industries that would benefit heavily from a few congressionally chartered nonprofits being booted up. Same employee comp (with cash substitutes for stock), same general structure, same incentives, but with a mandate to recycle profits back into new drug development rather than paying out to shareholders through buybacks, dividends, etc, all audited by a dedicated regulatory body to ensure that comp and waste don't go into excess. Perhaps with a requirement that some percentage of reinvestment is towards cures rather than treatments.
You see similar models with co-ops and credit unions.
The hope would be that the industry doesn't actually profit off of human suffering but still maintains incentive to continue development.
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#3Pharma strikes me as one of the industries that would benefit heavily from a few congressionally chartered nonprofits being booted up. Same employee comp (with cash substitutes for stock), same general structure, same incentives, but with a mandate to recycle profits back into new drug development rather than paying out to shareholders through buybacks, dividends, etc, all audited by a dedicated regulatory body to en…
Pharmaceuticals is a pretty capital intensive industry. Who's providing the capital? The government? Moreover, who's providing oversight? Congress? Given how dysfunctional the government is right now, and the tendency of government programs to turn into jobs/pork barrel programs (eg. F35), I'm skeptical that it's going to work out better.
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#4Pharma strikes me as one of the industries that would benefit heavily from a few congressionally chartered nonprofits being booted up. Same employee comp (with cash substitutes for stock), same general structure, same incentives, but with a mandate to recycle profits back into new drug development rather than paying out to shareholders through buybacks, dividends, etc, all audited by a dedicated regulatory body to en…
Pharmaceuticals is a pretty capital intensive industry. Who's providing the capital? The government? Moreover, who's providing oversight? Congress? Given how dysfunctional the government is right now, and the tendency of government programs to turn into jobs/pork barrel programs (eg. F35), I'm skeptical that it's going to work out better.
I'm in agreement here, I think the poster has an idea of the issue with profits, but typically anything the government can do, we can do infinitely better private.
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#5Pharma strikes me as one of the industries that would benefit heavily from a few congressionally chartered nonprofits being booted up. Same employee comp (with cash substitutes for stock), same general structure, same incentives, but with a mandate to recycle profits back into new drug development rather than paying out to shareholders through buybacks, dividends, etc, all audited by a dedicated regulatory body to en…
Like a kind of Service, for Health, covering the whole Nation... a National Health Service, perhaps! Sorry, brit here, couldn't resist. It's really interesting seeing (in my unscientific view) America slowly realising it needs to reform profit-driven health, while England's government slowly privatises its existing "free at poinnt of use" service and makes it harder for poorer people to access good health care.
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#6Pharma strikes me as one of the industries that would benefit heavily from a few congressionally chartered nonprofits being booted up. Same employee comp (with cash substitutes for stock), same general structure, same incentives, but with a mandate to recycle profits back into new drug development rather than paying out to shareholders through buybacks, dividends, etc, all audited by a dedicated regulatory body to en…
Pharmaceuticals is a pretty capital intensive industry. Who's providing the capital? The government? Moreover, who's providing oversight? Congress? Given how dysfunctional the government is right now, and the tendency of government programs to turn into jobs/pork barrel programs (eg. F35), I'm skeptical that it's going to work out better.
Moreover, what happens to all the work in progress when the government "shuts down"? People in publicly funded science have lost work in previous incidents where they were locked out of their buildings and unable to tend to long running experiments. America needs to work on its uptime.
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#7Pharma strikes me as one of the industries that would benefit heavily from a few congressionally chartered nonprofits being booted up. Same employee comp (with cash substitutes for stock), same general structure, same incentives, but with a mandate to recycle profits back into new drug development rather than paying out to shareholders through buybacks, dividends, etc, all audited by a dedicated regulatory body to en…
Pharmaceuticals is a pretty capital intensive industry. Who's providing the capital? The government? Moreover, who's providing oversight? Congress? Given how dysfunctional the government is right now, and the tendency of government programs to turn into jobs/pork barrel programs (eg. F35), I'm skeptical that it's going to work out better.
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Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#8[flagged]
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#9The only "innovation" of capitalism is intermediation, otherwise called "rent-seeking". One of the big lies Big Pharma tells you is that R&D is expensive but the actual R&D is done primarily by government funding and research at colleges. Big Pharma spends WAAY more on marketing.
The only real R&D Big Pharma does is patent extension. Patents have a life so companies will make minor changes to the molecule or the delivery mechanism to reset that patent protection period.
What makes Big Pharma particularly evil is it's one of those industries that profits from inelastic demand (ie people will die without some product) and buying the government to build a moat and make themselves a monopoly. The prices US consumers pay for pharmaceuticals is absolutely criminal.
This is capitalism working as intended: taking a captive market (eg diabetics that cannot live without insulin) and extracting wealth from them to the hands of a very few.
Re: How Big Pharma reaps profits while hurting everyday Americans (2019)
#10> A vial of NovoLog, one type of insulin, costs15 anywhere from $14 to $300 in the United States but only $48 in Singapore, $14 in India, $6 in Austria, and $0 in Italy.
I think a reasonable solution without having to dictate details is to require pharmaceutical companies give the US most favored nation status - that is they must provide the US the same price as the country where it is sold for the cheapest. Perhaps you exclude developing nations from that calculation.