The savings in reduced diabetes, heart disease and cancer would make up for it.
"Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#62The USA should nationalize the health care industry and all the pharmaceutical companies. Illness should not be a source of profit.
Going to leave a link here to a reddit thread I ran across recently for the curious. https://old.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1cn8dy8/what... Look at how many times NHS is referenced and how it is viewed by those utilizing the system. In my opinion, socialized medicine tends to fail as the overall demand for healthcare will usually exceed the available supply in most societies. I'm sure there are counterexampl…
Your point is “we have too many sick people, let some of them die so the rich can keep their ease of access” and it’s gross.
That’s what “demand” represents in this equation. Not people who want faster cars or different colored Stanley cups, but access to life saving drugs and treatment. I’m not saying para-socialized systems are better (it’s capitalism with a wig) but the “benefits” of capitalism are nowhere near equally shared and in fact highly concentrated at the top. The benefits are in fact over-appreciated by those who have them and they will do anything to keep the dirt people away from their stash.
I don’t have a solution, but my point is praising mass death for the squalid masses is tacky and I personally wouldn’t do it on public forums.
*edited for spelling error
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#63[dead]
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#64[deleted]
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not make an exception for life-saving patents/inventions? The irony that, were it not priced outrageously, it could save the health care industry billions as these people with obesity will otherwise require epesneive treatments if the remain obese.
> it could save the health care industry billions as these people with obesity will otherwise require epesneive treatments if the remain obese. "Could" is doing a lot of work there. We don't really know what to expect for these patients 20 or 40 years out. Long-term outcomes and population-scale polypharmacy risks are not really clear, and won't be for decades. These drugs enable a valuable intervention for individua…
Liraglutide has been in wide use for 14 years and trialled for a decade before that; we do have a good idea of what to expect for patients 20 years out.
Semaglutide was approved in 2017 and been very widely used (>9 million people). That's been wide & long enough to determine that risks are either exceedingly rare or significantly slow acting.
OTOH the risks and costs of obesity are massive and well known. We're weighing massive known benefits against risks that are either rare (likely less than 1 in a million) or take decades to manifest.
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it could save the health care industry billions as these people with obesity will otherwise require epesneive treatments if the remain obese. "Could" is doing a lot of work there. We don't really know what to expect for these patients 20 or 40 years out. Long-term outcomes and population-scale polypharmacy risks are not really clear, and won't be for decades. These drugs enable a valuable intervention for individua…
Exactly. I’m old enough to remember the Fen-Phen fallout. A truly harmless weight-loss drug is the white whale of the pharmaceutical (assuming it can be profitable enough to offset the losses that would go along with the decrease in needed treatment for problems ancillary to obesity). These drugs, so far, seem pretty good but some of the side effects should take the shine off for people who thing this is ”The Cure” f…
check out the DES babies (0) or Thalidomide if you want to see how little we understand long term effects...My mom was a nanny and one of the girls she raised was born sterile due to DES her mom was given _to support pregnancy_ !
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_defects_of_diethylstilbe...
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to pharmaceuticals, the patents are ridiculous. Take for example Contrave[0]. It is a combination of Naltrexone and Bupropion, both of which are no longer under a patent. Put them both in the same pill and it's under a new patent. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naltrexone/bupropion
So buying them separately and mixing them in your mouth is legal? It's like combining 2 pieces of open-source software and selling them under one product.
> It's like combining 2 pieces of open-source software and selling them under one product.
That describes a decent chunk of the tech industry!
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#68> A study by researchers at Yale estimated that drugs like Wegovy can be profitably manufactured for less than $5 per month. Serious question: Why not just bootleg the stuff? It's a very small protein, easy to make, and "research chemical" companies that sell structurally similar bodybuilding drugs and nootropics are a dime a dozen. Search online for "BPC-157" (a protein drug of only slightly inferior complexity) and…
I'm down for it or something similar. Not even joking. A. The issue becomes creating a manufacturing and cold chain distribution system involving the fewest people with compartmentalized knowledge. I'm not sure how you'd launder it or keep enough of it a secret to not get eventually busted because someone would open their mouth. It'd probably be busted with RICO if any sort of profits were involved. Must pay taxes, f…
> get eventually busted because someone would open their mouth
Aren't this what "corporations are people" prevent? Plenty of people doing shady, or outright evil stuff, get their way because they're behind a corporation.
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#69> A study by researchers at Yale estimated that drugs like Wegovy can be profitably manufactured for less than $5 per month. Serious question: Why not just bootleg the stuff? It's a very small protein, easy to make, and "research chemical" companies that sell structurally similar bodybuilding drugs and nootropics are a dime a dozen. Search online for "BPC-157" (a protein drug of only slightly inferior complexity) and…
Many reasons. One of them being doctors won't prescribe an off brand drug and insurance won't cover anything related to it.
The other reasons are:
1/ Even the manufacturer doesn't know everything about how the drug was made. They characterize the final compound but the compound was made by some sort of living cells so each one has different properties. For the same molecule, one cell line may produce a drug with entirely different toxicology profile compared to another. You need a full manufacturing chain with different departments analyzing it at different stages to guarantee the desired effect.
2/ Patents make sure that the vanishingly few groups with the capability to do the above characterization would not want to risk their business doing it.
3/ For every one molecule that made it to market, dozens or hundreds of others were discarded. They all cost about the same amount to develop up to the point they were thrown away. Due to the amount of regulations in place, the cost to research is obscene and the final manufacturing cost is peanut compared to the price of the pipeline what the drug went through.
Re: "Outrageously" priced weight-loss drugs could bankrupt US health care
#70[deleted]