101–110 of 138 posts
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Doctors should be the ones making the medical decisions, not the faceless employees working with spreadsheets at insurance companies. Our system is backwards and needs to be overhauled.
Seems like you wouldn’t like universal healthcare then, where such things happen to _everybody_.
One of the biggest reasons is that the US essentially subsidizes drugs for many other countries, such as Canada, that impose price controls, and threaten to allow other manufacturers to provide the drugs in their countries if the companies don't accept the imposed price. This enables these countries to get access to new medicine without paying the cost of developing the new medicine. Its time to end the trade war on…
I think you will find that this is what Big Pharma and their sockpuppets in Washington want you to believe. Through reading up on the 'opioid epidemic' you realise that a lot of this 'innovation' is not that great. Slow release tablets? There is no big deal there. Furthermore a lot of this 'research' is backwards, i.e. create a molecule that can be patented, see how much of it kills rats and then try and find some me…
[1] The effect of statins on average survival in randomised trials, an analysis of end point postponement
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctors should be the ones making the medical decisions, not the faceless employees working with spreadsheets at insurance companies. Our system is backwards and needs to be overhauled.
Seems like you wouldn’t like universal healthcare then, where such things happen to _everybody_.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes it's worth it! If you need to take a drug three times a day and the new version is only once, that can improve patient adherence and outcomes. For the moment, let's ignore that case by simply calling the improved drug a new drug. > However, sometimes the added value is minuscule. In that case insurance companies should just say "we're not paying for it since the added cost is not worth it". I'm still lost…
The pharmacist should do that, but they don't. I've done it before at a doctor. "Here is the latest drug!!". "Can we start with a generic?", "Sure". My co-pay just went from $50 per month to $5. I work with a lot of doctors, they don't think it's their job to save patients money. They'll do it if asked though.
Crazy idea: all pharmaceutical research should be publicly funded and publicly-owned. No private ownership of drug patents, period. "But this will disincentive research!" Maybe. Or, tax people more in order to fund the research. The tax revenue would go directly to researcher salary, equipment, expenses. Even a large tax increase can't be worse than today, where people have to pay huge $$$ anyway, of which a large cu…
The reality is that governments have demonstrated limited interest in effective biomedical R&D. Europe does not invest proportional to their population or economy, their governments are happy to outsource it to the US (and Asian) private sector. And there is the longstanding issue that what governments do fund is biased by political fashion and not the areas of research that will maximize benefit. There has been a hu…
You're also missing the part where most research is done via public grants and only the translational part is done by private industry. I looked up the profits compared to R&D at a big phrama company, and the dividends paid to shareholders were about on par. Their bellyaching is vastly overstated.
I'm a software engineer, and I took a 50%+ paycut to make the world a better place. One more anecdata vs. yours.
Crazy idea: all pharmaceutical research should be publicly funded and publicly-owned. No private ownership of drug patents, period. "But this will disincentive research!" Maybe. Or, tax people more in order to fund the research. The tax revenue would go directly to researcher salary, equipment, expenses. Even a large tax increase can't be worse than today, where people have to pay huge $$$ anyway, of which a large cu…
The reality is that governments have demonstrated limited interest in effective biomedical R&D. Europe does not invest proportional to their population or economy, their governments are happy to outsource it to the US (and Asian) private sector. And there is the longstanding issue that what governments do fund is biased by political fashion and not the areas of research that will maximize benefit. There has been a hu…
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Seems like you wouldn’t like universal healthcare then, where such things happen to _everybody_.
Stephen Hawking would have disagreed vehemently with you. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/i-would-not-...
There is another high profile ALS sufferer in the US: Jason Becker, a super virtuoso guitarist popular in the 80s, tragically afflicted at the very peak of his ability. Still alive, still writing music, but can’t move anything but his eyes or breathe. No one sentenced him to death or anything.
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Back when the HIV epidemic started, President Reagan and his administration took the view that HIV is a deserved punishment from god for homosexuality and promiscuity. Now what are the chances that that administration would have invested even $1 in developing drugs for AIDS? Do we want to live in that kind of world?
That's a singular example. And, that viewpoint eventually gave way.
Government is special: it can create generally accepted vision for a solution and it can enforce it vision, unlike a company on the free market.
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sorry, not sure what point you're trying to make?
I was agreeing with you. Trump want's the rest of the world to pay more for US pharmacuticals by stopping the free market (which is how those countries get good deals, by going out to tender), but he doesn't want to do anything to make things better in the US because of the free market.
I'd go a step further... you cannot sell a drug unless there is another company prepared to sell a generic version. It's a national security issue. Dual vendor required. Also, no blocks on re-imports from foreign nations.
So under your system, a drug for a super rare, low sales product would never get produced because no generic company wants to make it?