Goldman Sachs questions whether curing patients is a sustainable business model

Post by cornholio » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:24 AM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #48

cornholio wrote: post #42

Sure it is. Gilead made 100 billion dollars curring Hep-C with seed research investments that were probably much less than 1 billion. So as long as this strong differential and potential for profit exists, drug companies feel competitive pressure to produce better treatments, irrespective of the fact that "milking" the pathology would yield them trillions collectively. It's effectively a "tragedy of the commons" of s…

It would still require that the company that develops the cure could make more profit off it than it would make with chronic treatments. So if you went purely for profit, you could only develop a cure if: - you could price it higher than the price of the chronic therapy over the full lifetime of a patient. or - you could sell it to more patients than you could have sold the chronic treatment. A lot more, because ever…

Post by polskibus » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:29 AM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #39

The story goes that in China, doctors used to be paid for keeping you healthy. When you got sick, they didn't get any money anymore. This sounds to me like a system with the proper incentives.

Post by algo646464 » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #39

The story goes that in China, doctors used to be paid for keeping you healthy. When you got sick, they didn't get any money anymore. This sounds to me like a system with the proper incentives.

Post by dominotw » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

brann0 wrote: post #54

PeterStuer wrote: post #24

The 'ideal' drug from a business point of view not only not cures the patient long term, it offer a short term mitigation while increasing the risk on relapse and thus future recurring consumption of the treatment. At the same time it can be IP protected to block alternatives and has an insured third party collective payment coverage to guard against the treated running out of funds to afford the perpetual dependency…

So we agree medicine cannot be managed as a business, right? It's ok if healthcare losses money, in fact it should be ok for all public sevices to operate and not being profitable.

Post by dominotw » Fri, Apr 13, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #43

buvanshak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 'ideal' drug from a business point of view not only not cures the patient long term... There is another one. Vaccines. Or any preventive medicines that does not actually require people to be sick. You just need to inject massive amount of fear of diseases (Statistics is your friend here) into the populace to create a nice, ever increasing demand of your produce...

> There is another one. Vaccines. Vaccines are absolute shit from a business perspective. They're expensive to develop, generally cheap to produce, and their administration is a single or limited event point. Sure you've got breadth but you've got no depth, once an individual is vaccinated they're done, or maybe they'll need an other round years from now. Big pharma companies absolutely hate vaccines, having people p…