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Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

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Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#181
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pharma stocks actually underperform compare to other companies. So, it's not like pharma companies are making insane profits. Research, regulation, approvals and failures are expensive

> So, it's not like pharma companies are making insane profits. Huh. > Gilead Sciences gross profit for the twelve months ending December 31, 2023 was $20.618B Not insane profits, indeed.

That's GROSS profit. That's basically saying that the same as the article, they have insane margins, selling 5$ pills for 1000$. They have to pay for the other stuff. Net income was 5.6B. Still, a lot but yeah it's a big company.

GILD is down 10%+ YoY. SP500 is up 28% YoY. Or Cigna (health insurance, also 100B market cap) 43% up

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#182
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on what I'm trying to illustrate There's a lot of pensions and savings tied up in Novo stock, so a potential downturn would have a catastrophic impact on the danish citizens The danish economy is, to a large extend, dependent on the stock price of Novo, not its revenue

Asset values should be compared against asset values. Novo Nordisk makes 17% of Danish stock index. Vestas and DSV are both 10% (Foreign investors' ownership of listed Danish shares is over 50%, so I assume the situation is similar to NN when you remove the foundation owned stocks)

I'm honestly not sure if you're trolling here - you seem to purposefully be missing the point and I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to achieve here

If a country's largest company based on market cap is bigger than the next 50 companies combined, is the most popular stock among the countries retail investors, and is the current sole driver of economic growth in said country, that's a significant risk

Making a comparison between the value generated in a country compared to the total price of a company is a way to illustrate how massive the company actually is - same as when making a comparison to how many years I'd need to work to have earned as much as Jeff Bezos net worth

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#183
post #2

Ozempic is blowing up on TikTok. Celebs and young people are using it left and right. This is wildly popular and there are resellers and apps popping up everywhere to make it easy to get prescriptions. "Ozempic face" has become a meme as people try to guess who is using it. Several of my neighbors are admittedly using it. And they've lost 30, 40+ pounds in a matter of months. Months . This is a diabetes drug. There h…

GLP-1 medications have been hypothesized to possibly result in the loss of muscle mass and bone density. There will probably be better data in a few years.

> GLP-1 medications have been hypothesized to possibly result in the loss of muscle mass and bone density.

Yikes. I wonder if there could be long term cardiac or pulmonary health issues as a result of this.

I'm also interested if this creates long-term insulin or pancreatic dysfunction.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#184

I think the complexity of the issue isn't really reflected by the article. The most obvious points that are missing are the risks associated with developing a new drug, the costs of research, and the regulatory requirements from the FDA Since pharmaceutical companies are, for the most part, publicly traded they're beholden to stock holders to create a profit. If they stop doing that they're in trouble If the ability…

No, publicly traded companies are beholden to act in the interests of the shareholders which in practicality is fairly vague. All companies are sort of designed to turn a profit or try to as they generally need that to continue existing but there is no legal requirement that they need to create a profit or maximize it, publicly traded or not. Obviously, companies do try to maximize profit as it makes everyone involve…

Which I think aligns with what I wrote, since I specifically didn't state that they are required to maximise profits for their shareholders, only that they are beholden to said shareholders

In reality those shareholders will pretty much always demand that the company maximise their ROI, so in reality I don't think it matters whether they are required to or not

If they don't they'll be eaten by a company that does and the outcome will be the same

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of, I think that health-care prices in the US are horrible and have terrible consequences for patients However, the blame doesn't lie with pharmaceutical companies. They're not selling their products cheaper elsewhere because they hate the US and love other countries They're doing it because the US has created a system that benefits corporations more than its citizens. If blame needs to be distributed it lies w…

And they’re actively lobbying to keep it that way.

Which they can do because the US has created a system that incentivizes companies to lobby for their own interests over that of the US population

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#186
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope it's not. They can get paid a wage from gov and charge nothing. Private Healthcare in its entirety is unethical. Shouldnt exist. Full stop.

That's exactly the more interesting discussion I meant. Who pays the doctor, nurse, pharmaceutical companies, how are wages and prices negotiated etc. But I hope you agree that in all of these models, the doctor does in the end get paid, i.e. accepts payment? I never said that the patient should be the one paying them directly. But if nobody does, there will be no doctor.

Have the entire healthcare system gov run. Need funds for it? Write em up out of thin air. Keep wages pegged above avg labor market because having a healthy society is more productive than an unhealthy one. To the extent where all other industries come 2nd as they are basically useless without healthcare keeping their workforce alive. Can't run a company if all your workers can't get well once they get sick. Literal unnecessary waste of human resources all because we want to prop up a few folks profits? The jobs and demand for the work will still be there if it's gov run, you just don't have a swathe of investors profiting off it. Zero loss. Go invest elsewhere.

One of the arguments against this is inflation from creating money out of thin air to fund it. Its a lie. The service is required and you don't get inflation from paying folks a wage to do a job. You do get it by propping up profits of private companies which essentually through the fattening of their bank accounts devalues money. Remember if you have a large number of folks competing for a good or service and they are all on similar playing fields (e.g wages near market avg), competition is high, the value of each dollar earned remains high.

If you have a handful of companies with buying power that far outweighs that of others allowing them to capture more than their share of a service or good because they can literally just throw more money at it than the majority of us can. This drives Inflation. It devalues money creating a new norm of your dollars being worth less.

Tldr: The benefit from entirely gov funded healthcare far outweighs that of a privatized system.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#187
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that point, but given that Ozempic sells for significantly less in other countries I think it's worth considering why it's that much more expensive in the US

Isn't everything healthcare-related much more expensive in the US?

It is, which is why I think it's silly to focus on a single drug, when I think it's a pretty obvious systemic issue in how the US has structured its healthcare system

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, they are not selling the drugs at a price that is below their marginal costs. But they are also not selling drugs at a price that compensates them for the development cost, including the cost of drugs that didn't reach the market. They are free riding on this latter part.

That's a pretty strong claim. Do you have a source for that?

Since the price of Ozempic in France is 1/10th the price in the US, you either admit France is not paying their share of the development costs, or you think the US price is way excessive even taking development into account.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the last one makes the distinction between modern synthetics and basic insulin. Frankly the US pays for the cost of the research while the rest of the world just pays for the cost of production. If you want to fix the cost of insulin products (and many other drugs) in the US you need to figure out how to make everybody else pay for the true costs. Edit: also your last source there doesn't even know what it's tal…

> Frankly the US pays for the cost of the research while the rest of the world just pays for the cost of production. Top 10 pharma companies, 5/10 are US (2 UK, 2 Swiss, 1 French). 4 of the top 6 for profit margins (from 43%(!) to 19%) are US (Merck is the only outlier, 9th, at 10%). 4 of the top 5 for Sales and Marketing Spend (both on raw dollars and as a percentage of revenue) are US. 3 of the bottom 5 for R&D spe…

Keep in mind that marketing is a bit complicated - very few countries allow direct to consumer marketing. I think kits just the US and New Zealand. Obviously there would still be marketing in other countries, but a heavy US presence likely skews things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer_advertisi...

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#190
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so it would be better for orzempic to cost $850,000 and limit its indication to people with MODY? How is that realistic? TBH I have way less a problem with pharma industry being allowed to make profits than health insurance companies. In fact the US is about the only country in the world that allows profits from health insurance.

The target market for Ozempic is tens of millions of people taking it every week. The blindness thing has a worldwide demand cap of about 40 doses per year - it's a single dose for life in each eye). Are you equally surprised when a one-off bespoke PCB costs more than a stock RaspPi?

The point was the profit margin on both the blindness drug and AMD CPUs are significantly higher than for ozempic.

So why target ozempic for too high a profit margin?

Caveated with its the health insurance industry is paying that profit margin - not the people who _should_ be taking it.

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