321–330 of 422 posts
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How much is spent on marketing in comparison? Only in the US and New Zealand can you market drugs directly to the public. I sense an opportunity to destroy an unnecessary cost.
$6 billion for direct to consumer marketing. Versus $71 billion in R&D.
I'm really past the whole "pharma need to charge high prices to fund research" line of argument. Aside from being factually untrue (research funding is dwarfed by marketing for example[0]), it is also arguing for a continued unhealthy relationship with pharmaceutical care. A large amount of research is currently publicly funded. Either via public academic research or directly. When that research bears fruit it is oft…
other countries haven't
Ummm... you do realize that most big pharma companies are European, right? Bayer is German, GSK is British, etc...
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It is where I live, so weird visiting the US and seeing "ask your doctor for" adverts. If I asked my GP for a specific medication they'd look at me like an alien.
On the other hand, I hate the general attitude of "don't question your doctor or do your own medical research; the doctor knows what's best" Doctors are mortals too and can only have so much time to draw on info they crammed X years ago. Patients can quickly become more expert than GPs with regards to their own diseases, especially if they have months to research it. Anecdotal example - my sister had a wierd skin con…
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I don’t demand my roads, libraries, or other public goods turn a profit. I wouldn’t demand the same of public pharma research (NIH, DARPA). Perhaps the market is not designed for this sort of endeavor (drug research). Let government stand in where the market has failed.
Except the market has succeeded fantastically. In my lifetime alone, AIDS and HepC went from death sentences to chronic conditions. Many forms of leukemia went from fatal to highly treatable. Meanwhile, what has the government done? The trip from DC to New York on Amtrak is slower today than it was in 1960. In 1980, DC’s Metro had self driving trains. They had to shut that down in 2009 due to lack of maintenance and…
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Food is far more important for human survival than medicine. Somehow we're able to allow a free market with for profit food producers and distributors. Lots of research is done to make better/heartier foods. Prices are quite reasonable for food with stable inflation. Almost no one thinks it'd be a good idea to nationalize food research, production and distribution. The solution seems clear to me: take a look at the r…
The market for food is not at all like the market for medicine. The main difference is that food is far more fungible than drugs are. If a patient is suffering an illness, there may be only one drug that will help, whereas if one needs calories, or vegetables, there are many more options. Having said that, there is a reasonable argument to be made that the FDA and the patent situation stifles innovation and that most…
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Ironically, insulin is a great example of why your premise is false: Insulin replacement was developed a century ago, being first discovered by a government entity (U of Toronto). Private companies commercialized the treatments in the 1940s and 1950s, developing long acting forms that could be administered in a single injection per day. Since then, pharmaceutical companies have made continuous improvements with fewer…
It's quite telling what you excluded in your rendition of history. The original research for the synthesis of insulin was actually done in Europe by a private citizen (not a government entity). That research was followed up on by a surgeon with a private practice in Canada, and only after a time was it taken to the U of Toronto. The work leading to a manufacturable insulin process was done in collaboration with anoth…
To be really clear:
1) A company receives patent X in 2000, which expires in 2020.
2) In 2018, that company gets a new patent Y that is really patent X but with "small, insignificant" changes.
Are you saying that after step 2, that original patent for X is now extended or will that still go generic in 2020?
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>The purpose of these laws is to protect patients Its not the patients that lobbies for these laws...it is the insurers, and its to lower their costs. Its also why the insurers pay the pharmacists a bonus for these changes, if it was about costs to the patient, the bonuses (money back) would go to the patient.
> Its not the patients that lobbies for these laws...it is the insurers, and its to lower their costs. I mean, no, patients don't lobby for them because patients don't really lobby en masse for healthcare policy in general, but patients definitely are the ones who benefit from them. There are some cases where the relationship between insurers and patients is adversarial. This is not one of them.
See Medicare for All.
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> research funding is dwarfed by marketing for example i really believe pharma advertising should be banned
Note that the biggest portion of what’s counted as “pharmaceutical advertising” is actually free samples: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2019/01/11/51... The TV ads you see for drugs add up to $6 billion, which is a small fraction compared to industry R&D.
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Food is far more important for human survival than medicine. Somehow we're able to allow a free market with for profit food producers and distributors. Lots of research is done to make better/heartier foods. Prices are quite reasonable for food with stable inflation. Almost no one thinks it'd be a good idea to nationalize food research, production and distribution. The solution seems clear to me: take a look at the r…
The market for food is not at all like the market for medicine. The main difference is that food is far more fungible than drugs are. If a patient is suffering an illness, there may be only one drug that will help, whereas if one needs calories, or vegetables, there are many more options. Having said that, there is a reasonable argument to be made that the FDA and the patent situation stifles innovation and that most…
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If you are rich, get cancer and can pick any country to get treatment in, which country do you go to? Obviously it would depend on the specific cancer, but I think the US would be the best bet in aggregate.
And if you're not rich, and get cancer, which country do you go to? I bet in aggregate it is never the US.