[HN Gopher] Big Pharma Greed's Knows No Bounds
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Big Pharma Greed's Knows No Bounds
Author : sfusato
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-01-21 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenation.com)
| based_karen wrote:
| [dead]
| pg_bot wrote:
| Big Pharma also pays billions in taxes to fund agencies like the
| NIH. While there are certainly a lot of shenanigans with
| intellectual property rights and market exclusivity at the end of
| the day we do get extreme value from pharmaceutical companies. If
| there was more competition, we would not see price hikes as often
| as we do.
| xracy wrote:
| People pretend like competition is some magic thing that could
| crop up, and not a thing that requires constant regulation to
| prevent companies from engaging in anti-competitive behavior.
| Every company is incentivized to engage in anti-competitive
| behavior. If you want more competition, they need to be
| strictly regulated.
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.ph/BxBSk
| akomtu wrote:
| Greed is a fundamental force of nature that gives life to the
| capitalism machine and our society. Money are the carrier
| particles of greed, they enable it to reach far. Corporations are
| the star-like centers of greed. Even though greed is poisonous,
| it's far better than fear that was the force behind master-slave
| societies of the past.
|
| The next iteration of our society will run on pure ambition: the
| desire to be better, more knowledgeable or skillful, than others.
| pandeiro wrote:
| [flagged]
| seaourfreed wrote:
| Don't worry. Congress is going to protect us, and stop all wrong
| doing. Just kidding. Congress is going to sell us out. Congress
| will create any and all corruption that the pharma industry want.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| 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.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| I would like people to innovate as well, but covid vaccines are
| probably one of the worst examples that you could have used.
| hourago wrote:
| > I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers.
|
| I want citizens to not die of treatable diseases. Our goals
| seem to be different.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I want citizens not to die of untreatable diseases. It is
| better to have very expensive treatments for a disease than
| no treatments for a disease.
| envp wrote:
| What good is a treatment if you can't access it? If you're
| poor enough even food poisoning is "untreatable".
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Presumably at least 1 person would be able to access the
| treatment. 1 is infinitely greater than the 0 people who
| would have access to the treatment of there was none.
|
| In addition, like all technology, there is a tendency to
| go from something for the very rich to something common.
| hourago wrote:
| > It is better to have very expensive treatments for a
| disease than no treatments for a disease.
|
| False duality. We can have treatments fairly priced. The
| only reason that this ones are so expensive is because
| monopolies and corruption.
| sfusato wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| Sure, in an utopian world that would work. But, here on planet
| Earth, that would massively increase the incentives of fraud.
| There are already huge issues with this. Increasing the payout
| by x100 would do more harm than good in this context.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Didn't really cure anything tho I'f they price treatment out of
| reach of the masses. It'd just be better seeing rules in place
| so billionaires don't exist. The concept one individual can
| have so much is absurd. Basically a sign of a failing society
| to allow such polarization between wages at the top and the
| bottom.
| scotty79 wrote:
| That's not what happens in Big Pharma. In anything but covid
| their huge money makers are marketing, lobbying and bribery.
| Medical innovation lies somewhere at the bitter end.
|
| Successful covid vaccines didn't come from Big Pharma. Moderna
| and Novartis were not that.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I agree in part and disagree in part. I want there to be a
| financial incentive to improve the lives of humanity via
| medical advances, whether that's pharmaceutical, surgical,
| assistive devices, etc.
|
| I also want to leave money for the rest of the economy, so that
| doesn't really leave room for $5200/year/person for 2 COVID
| shots. (That's about 7.5% of GDP just for COVID shots if every
| American gets 2 such shots per year, which is pretty obviously
| untenable.)
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| 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.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| ...yes? Why is "greedy" in scare quotes?
| from wrote:
| 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 and
| have an infection drained? 90% of all prescriptions in America
| are for generic drugs that cost almost nothing. It's easy to
| blame pharmaceutical companies because it is a somewhat
| concentrated industry but no one questions why their local
| urgent care physician is making $275,000 a year to basically
| Google symptoms and give out prescriptions.
| mlsu wrote:
| This is the sad reality. Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare
| admin. staff consume the fat of healthcare market failure.
| But nobody wants to blame them -- they like their doctor;
| being a doctor is hard, so if you are a doctor you deserve a
| Ferrari.
| Sebguer wrote:
| 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.
| from wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| I can't speak for anyone else, but I absolutely question
| every aspect of why healthcare in the US is overpriced,
| including but not limited to overcharging for stuff that is a
| glorified search on webmd.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| 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.
| detrites wrote:
| 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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 greedy.
|
| If pharmaceutical companies were free market entities who took
| all of the risk of developing new drugs, then it might be
| justifiable for them to charge whatever the market will bear.
| But that's not how drug research works in our society; in our
| society, we already pay for much of the research with our
| taxes, so pharma companies that are doing parts of the research
| and producing the drugs are not operating in a free market.
| They are benefiting from government largesse, and there are
| limitations that go along with that.
| nhchris wrote:
| > in our society, we already pay for much of the research
| with our taxes
|
| I don't know if there was a study done for the Moderna
| vaccine funding, but the AstraZeneca vaccine research was 97%
| publicly funded, so "much" is an understatement.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz.
| ..
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>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....
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Well, yeah? That is, essentially, the definition of greed: a
| "selfish and excessive desire for something".
|
| I would say that excluding people from accessing life saving
| drugs, is definitely "greedy", even more so if the company has
| received a massive influx of cash from the government, like
| Moderna.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| Yes it is. It's the "as much money as possible" part that makes
| it so.
|
| It's fine to charge cost plus some nice profit.
|
| But trying to maximise the price in a medical context is
| morally equivalent to finding a person dying in the desert and
| making them sign all their assets over to you before giving
| them water.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, when your life doesn't depend on it, then you don't care
| as much if someone is trying to exploit you.
| scotty79 wrote:
| That is correct. If you are away from me then I don't care. If
| I'm falling to my death but you somehow managed to grab the
| rope and can stop my fall and pull me back up but instead you
| use this opportunity to demand as much money from me as
| possible then calling you "greedy" is literally mildest what
| anyone can call you.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| The hep c vaccine is one of the biggest examples of this. No
| money, no cure.
| tombert wrote:
| Isn't this the _exact_ justification that Martin Shkreli used?
|
| It's not hypocritical; when your life literally depends on
| something, and they have a monopoly on the only thing that will
| save your life, it's absolutely greedy to try and maximize
| profits.
|
| When Apple overcharges for an iPhone, there are a few things
| that make this less evil:
|
| 1. There are lots of different smartphones out there that you
| have the option to buy instead. Even when I worked at Apple I
| found it surprisingly easy to get by on an Android for my first
| three months.
|
| 2. I don't die when I don't have an iPhone.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Not justifying fleecing taxpayers, but you also generally
| don't pay for drugs, your insurance or Medicare does. Most
| pharma (including iirc shkreli's) companies have access
| programs.
|
| Not justifying Martin or excessive pharma prices but it
| really is the case that we should disabuse ourselves from the
| notion that one should be entitled to life-saving care.
|
| That process comes with a _lot_ of externalities. Most drugs
| are incredibly costly to manufacture in terms of
| environmental damage (petrochemical solvents and cosolvents,
| water for purification, etc). I loved my dad but when he was
| dying I remember wondering why our society was bearing the
| ~100k per week cost because he didn 't want to die. When mom
| was too weak to pull the plug I stepped in and made the hard
| (easy?) choice.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Worded differently: the less captive the audience, the less
| significant is the issue of price-gauging.
| robnado wrote:
| 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.
| anticensor wrote:
| Yeah, pricing-based manipulation works only best if supply
| is completely inelastic but demand is completely elastic.
| nullish_signal wrote:
| I want an end to Pharmaceutical Ads in the USA
| TrueGeek wrote:
| I spend $900 a month on an anti-seizure drug. At least, until I
| hit my $6,500 deductible.
|
| The company that makes it is publicly traded so I looked up
| their financials. The drug is a generic and the patent expired
| decades ago. Very little is spent on "R&D". Almost all of their
| money goes to "advertising".
| nosianu wrote:
| 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.)_
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| 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.
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