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Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

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Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#21

Post by happytoexplain »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.

You're putting the word greedy in quotes, but what you're saying is exactly correct. People will pay anything to save their own life. If the market is allowed to react to that in an unrestricted manner, that quickly raises the wealth floor on being able to save your own life, which is, patently, morally incorrect in cases where the profit margin is high. It is antithetical to civilization. The fact that people who disagree with that high-level concept in the broad sense are not vanishingly rare is a desperate societal emergency.

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#22

Post by detrites »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.

Whether true or apocryphal, there exists this intriguing idea that in China's past, they had a system of medicine where doctors were paid a salary when the client was in good health, which immediately ceased if they fell ill.

What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and services that are working less and less.

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#23

Post by phpisthebest »

pdonis wrote: post #11
amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.

> if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it. If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and then you try to quadruple the price of what you're producing after you've already sold billions of units at a nice tidy profit, yes, that's gr…

>>If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and

And exemption from all legal liability for your product even if due to quality control issues during manufacturing....

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#24

Post by from »

Sebguer wrote: post #20
from wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What people also don't realize is that they only have the 20 year patent period to make money in. After that the drug is copied by generics companies. This incentivises innovation while also not placing a permanent burden on the economy. Pharmaceuticals are 10-20% of healthcare spending and probably have a very good $/lives saved ratio. Isn't it great how you can just take cefalexin instead of having to get cut open…

You're preaching a completely false dichotomy here, especially given that much of the research is publicly funded or heavily based upon existing public research, anyway.

I assume you're referring to studies like https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1715368115 that say publicly funded research has contributed to many major drugs. Yes that is true, but exactly how much is hard to quantify. If designing a new drug just required mooching off existing research the return on investment for making a new drug wouldn't be so high -- there is a reason every week small cap pharmaceutical companies on the NASDAQ either 10x or go to zero because of a drug approval/rejection. They are taking an enormous amount of risk! The average drug that gets approved cost a billion dollars to make.

And I can find studies like: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126

> In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on R&D. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s.

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#25

Post by robnado »

thomassmith65 wrote: post #7
amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.

Worded differently: the less captive the audience, the less significant is the issue of price-gauging.

Worded differently: when the demand curve is inelastic, changes in price don’t change demand much in the short term. For more elastic curves, higher prices reduce demand a lot more, which incentivizes setting a lower price if businesses are to optimize profit.

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#26

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Even at 100x the price, the COVID vaccines have more consumer surplus than most things people buy. I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers. I want founders and early employees in companies that innovate in these spaces to be fabulously wealthy. I want ambitious young people to dream of becoming a billionaire by curing cancer rather thank making a social media app.

I would like people to innovate as well, but covid vaccines are probably one of the worst examples that you could have used.

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#28

Post by Mountain_Skies »

nosianu wrote: post #19
nullish_signal wrote: post #3

I want an end to Pharmaceutical Ads in the USA

In support, the headline from four days ago: > 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds > Ads often tout new, pricey drugs that are not much better than old, cheaper ones. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/most-prescription-dr... Also: > The US is one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials. (The other is New Zealand…

Amazing how many of them don't even bother to advertise what the drug does. They just show happy people who say they use that brand of drug, often with zero context of what it actually does. It's mainly for brand affinity now.

Re: Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds

#30

Post by luckylion »

detrites wrote: post #22
amadeuspagel wrote: post #2

If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.

Whether true or apocryphal, there exists this intriguing idea that in China's past, they had a system of medicine where doctors were paid a salary when the client was in good health, which immediately ceased if they fell ill. What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and service…

We do that with "almost everything"? I can't think of anything.

I don't think e.g. phone service is comparable, because while you might not pay when the service is down, the service's uptime doesn't depend on you. If you destroy your cell phone, you can't use the service, but the service is still working.

If you sold "medicine as a service", it would just include that, but it couldn't guarantee that you'd always be healthy, no matter what choices you made.

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