What is your life worth ...

Darat said:
That's marketing not R&D!
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Correct. You can fool a lot of people into thinking your old product is new and cool, when it's just old wine in new bottles (or old chocolate milk...).

You can't do that with cancer drugs. You have to come up with something that really is better.
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
Of course in a truely free market, we wouldn't have any new drugs. :rolleyes:
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If by this you mean that a truly free-market has perfect information (in addition to zero barrier to entry/exit, homogenous products, zero profit etc), then yes. Of course that's impossible, not because of government intervention but because of reality intervention. What's not impossible is doing away with intellectual property (a human construct).
 
BPSCG said:
You can't do that with cancer drugs. You have to come up with something that really is better.
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I'll believe that when every hospital in the world uses the exact same drugs for everything. I think you mean it's harder to do that with cancer drugs (as they presumably market to more intelligent people than the average joe). Ever met a pharma rep?
 
The Central Scrutinizer said:
What I meant is that if we do away with intellectual property protections (your free market fantasy), we will have no new drugs.
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No, I think what you mean is that you're confused. I've always maintained the property is neccessary component to the development of drugs (meaning government intervention is a good thing). However, such government intervention is not really consistent with a free-market (as defined by economists). It's not a matter of this being MY fantasy. It is what it is.
 
Well now. Too bad if a drug is out of reach of an average hard working man in America or Europe, eh?

Thank you're lucky stars you ain't in Africa , where kids die of diarrhoea because their folks can't afford bicarbonate of soda , salt, sugar and clean water. Assuming they haven't died of AIDS yet.

Anyone have any Glaxo stock they don't want to soil their portfolio with, I'll take it off you free. Can't say fairer than that.

The market will decide the price. If it's too high, nobody will buy it, just like cars, which also save lives now and then. Getting the government to buy things is how you get $1000 suppositories to go with the $500,000 toilet seat.
 
Cain said:
Cue market fundamentalists: "It's absurd that a company has to 'justify' the price of their drugs at all! The 'morality' of the matter is this: private entrepeneurs competing for profits; trading what they created with their MINDS for dollars. Simply allow the free-market to "discipline" those who charge "too much".
{skip}
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It's not that simple. As others have pointed out, many pharmaceutical companies are not operating under strictly capitalistic or free market rules.

See this web site for more info on other ways the free-market rules don't apply to the pharmaceutical companies: http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=50366

Most industrialized nations restrict how much pharmacy companies can charge consumer for drugs. (source: above web site.) That being the case, pharmaceutical companies look to recoup a large portion of their R&D from Americans because the USA does not restrict the cost of drugs.

The average American consumer can't really do much about that, legally anyway. Although pharmaceutical companies can export their drugs, technically it's illegal for American consumers to purchase their drugs (even the ones made in America with FDA approval) directly in other countries. (Americans like to do this because it's less expensive.) So the pharmaceutical companies and the average consumer are being treated very differently. The company can export (and import also -- but that’s another topic) as they please, but the average American consumer can't.
 
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The Central Scrutinizer said:
I've always thought they were pointing out how their businesses are the same as others and should be afforded the same opportunities.
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The impression they're trying to put across is that they're the same as any other business, when in fact they're the same as other businesses which have patents. Most businesses don't.

Patents were introduced to encourage innovation. Few people will put time and money into developing an idea if established businesses, with more capital and existing customers, can read about it in SciAm and fill the market with no return to the inventor. The inventor is left with the option of keeping a process secret while they exploit it, which is not to the greater good. Sadly, patents have often been circumvented by businesses that can out-lawyer the inventor, and many's the inventor that's gone to the grave early, beggared and (quite often) insane.

Big companies with patents are unlikely to be out-lawyered. Drug companies are huge after the concentration of the last few decades - what was Glaxo is now Glaxo-Welcome-SmithKlyne, as I recall - so they reap the full benefit of the patent system. Thus their consistently high profitability.

We do get new drugs from outside that system, from Universities and Foundations. If a billionaire develops prostate cancer research kicks up a few notches. Publicly-funded research tends to be directed towards common diseases, without consideration of the market demographic, which is something of crucial importance to drug companies. Drug companies concentrate on the diseases of the affluent. And they aren't much interested in cures - they're more interested in ameliorating chronic diseases.

I favour publicly-funded research into medicine as giving more bangs to the buck.
 
Soapy Sam said:
where kids die of diarrhoea because their folks can't afford bicarbonate of soda , salt, sugar and clean water.
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Pedantic mode:
Diarrhea is a symptom, not a condition, and the only way it can kill you by itself (and this is still a long shot) is dehydration. Medicine (and its affordability/availibility) is not really that critical here; if you don't have water, you're in pretty bad shape anyway.
 
Shera said:
Most industrialized nations restrict how much pharmacy companies can charge consumer for drugs. (source: above web site.) That being the case, pharmaceutical companies look to recoup a large portion of their R&D from Americans because the USA does not restrict the cost of drugs.
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Presumably in an essentially insurance-based system such as in the US, the insurance companies impose limits? I assume most people on this $100K pa treatment will be relying on insurance to pay for it in the US.
 
aerosolben said:
Pedantic mode:
Diarrhea is a symptom, not a condition, and the only way it can kill you by itself (and this is still a long shot) is dehydration. Medicine (and its affordability/availibility) is not really that critical here; if you don't have water, you're in pretty bad shape anyway.
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Diarrhea, in this context, covers a range of parasitical infections that kill by dehydration and the loss of electrolytes. This is a particular problem in Africa, since that's where parasites have been evolving right along with humans since forever. The parasites can be killed with quite cheap drugs, and people can be kept alive with simple salts and sucrose. Until clean water is available, treating the symptomatic is the best option.
 
CapelDodger said:
The parasites can be killed with quite cheap drugs, and people can be kept alive with simple salts and sucrose. Until clean water is available, treating the symptomatic is the best option.
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This is actually what I mean. The drugs are for treating the root cause, not the diarrhea itself. While there do exist drugs to treat diarrhea, these are not really that critical - clean water and sugars are what is really important. So blaming the pharma companies for killing people with diarrhea is a little inappropriate. Blaming for parasites, maybe, but that's not what was said (and the use of diarrhea alone implies that a simple condition we all experience is killing Africans, which is inaccurate).

A bit pendantic, but I did preface my comment with that.
 
This is great. How often can you sit around and chat on the Internet about diarrhea?
 
CapelDodger said:
Presumably in an essentially insurance-based system such as in the US, the insurance companies impose limits? I assume most people on this $100K pa treatment will be relying on insurance to pay for it in the US.
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Good question. I don't know what is going to happen. I don't know that much about medical insurance except that the insurance policy determines which medical treatments are covered and which aren't , and what the allowed choices of doctors and hospitals are. As far as prescriptions goes, most people in the States belong to either an HMO, POS or PPS all of which usually means that to get a prescription filled, one needs to go to a drugstore chain approved by his/her insurance company.

I do vaguely recall that back when treating AIDS was a more expensive treatment at least some of the insurance plans I received from various employers I had over the years specifically excluded treatment for AIDs from insurance coverage. Some of them I think put a dollar limitation on total coverage paid out per individual policy. Perhaps the American insurance companies will decide to do the same for this cancer treatment.

Hopefully someone else in the forum can provide a better answer.
 
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Shera said:
Good question. I don't know what is going to happen. I don't know that much about medical insurance except that the insurance policy determines which medical treatments are covered and which aren't , and what the allowed choices of doctors and hospitals are. As far as prescriptions goes, most people in the States belong to either an HMO, POS or PPS all of which usually means that to get a prescription filled, one needs to go to a drugstore chain approved by his/her insurance company.

I do vaguely recall that back when treating AIDS was a more expensive treatment at least some of the insurance plans I received from various employers I had over the years specifically excluded treatment for AIDs from insurance coverage. Some of them I think put a dollar limitation on total coverage paid out per individual policy. Perhaps the American insurance companies will decide to do the same for this cancer treatment.

Hopefully someone else in the forum can provide a better answer.
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Short answer is yes, the overwhelming majority of insurance policies have a limit as to their maximum payout. For many, that limit is quite low.
 
Skeptic said:
So forcing the company to sell cheaper or to not get a patent would simply make the companies not develop those drugs, hence nobody will have them. What SHOULD (ethically, although perhaps it's hard to do practically) is to have the government subsidize the price of this drug to the client.

This way, the patient gets the drugs, and the company doesn't lose money. What is true is that the taxpayers are forced to pay for a drug that does not benefit most of them.
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Welcome to Canada.
 
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