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American health care vs the world!
Posts
If you have your own plants you aren't dependant on the good will of the US government/US corps, to provide you with access to a drug you need.
You also don't have to worry that the price will go steadily up once they have you hooked because they know they have you by the short and curleys.
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.
Although they cheat like fuck to try and get through this stage. The amount of hidden trial data is staggering.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
I wouldn't place the value of not being a thief above my own life or those of others, no.
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.
That wasn't the question though. The question was "why would anyone in a poor country pay a discounted price for drugs when they can get the pirated generic for free." That is pretty different, no? I don't think anyone but Kant would suggest that someone ought to die before they would steal.
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
He lives on as cheezburger grease in our hearts.
Short answer: international treaties.
India has agreed to uphold international IP law. In the long run, this benefits India. If they're perceived as a rogue nation with regards to IP, then other richer countries are less likely to do business with them.
And we're not talking about somebody making knock-offs in a garage somewhere. We're talking about a national, legitimate pharmaceutical industry. It's in India's best interest to keep that industry on the right side of the law.
Yeah, they do.
Well, developing a drug and getting it approved by FDA (or EU or Japan) is very expensive. The company who bears that responsibility should get some profit out of it, or else there's no incentive to develop new drugs. That's why the pharma patent system exists in the first place.
From 2009, with nice graph: http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/07/08/how_much_does_the_drug_industry_spend_on_marketing.php
(SG&A = sales, general, & administrative. COGS = cost of goods sold.)
Same authors as the 2008 paper, but back at it again in 2012. sadly, paywalled unless you have access to BMJ: http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4348
Annoyingly it doesn't separate it further into specific marketing costs. In nearly every company however the M/A/A spends more than double that of the R&D, and all but two have profit margins also in excess of their R&D spending.
So the middle-class pharma rep making 40-60k a year is included in that 30-odd percent.
any idea how much the average lab tech in the R&D department would be making for comparison?
Yes marketing costs include paying for marketing people's salaries. But the point is that in a scenario where the company negotiates with UHC wholesalers, a lot of those jobs marketing directly to consumers and doctors don't have to exist, and the savings can be passed onto the reduced costs for the product the UHC organisation demands.
It is also worth noting that "marketing costs" are for every drug they sell, including the ones they got approved 5 years ago, where as R&D are just for the ones they are researching now.
edit: this isn't one of those conspiracy theory posts, if they accidentally find a cure for autism you can bet your ass they'd sell it just because they'd want to be first to market with it, however it's optimal to come up with a pill that treats autism that someone needs to take forever so things like that get more research dollars
And it is worth pointing out a second time that this is a myth.
Which pharma company fills their R&D staff strictly with graduates from private universities?
because I was under the impression most of them were from public universities, and this isn't even going into how basically the entire US healthcare system is supported on the back of Medicare, who can't negotiate for drug prices
Speaking of generics
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/05/15/ranbaxy-fraud-lipitor/
This article is fucking maddening.
I think he meant the "their focus is on long term symptom treatment and not curing things" is a myth, not the support from publicly funded universities?
So, you've never seen any evidence of it, but you're pretty sure it is totally happening.
for-profit corporations don't exist to help people
Just some armchair data analysis here, but there's a reasonably strong correlation between the ratio of R&D to Marketing, and the net profit of those companies. Basically, the more they spend on R&D relative to marketing, the higher their profit.
Just throwing that out there.
edit: Correlation coefficient between those is about 0.52, which I figured out because I was kind of bored. So not super-strong, just moderate.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Yeah about those....They are sort of a scam.
Basically at some point insurance companies figured out they need to encourage people to get the generics to save themselves $. So they tiered the copay system. Generics $20, non-Generics $50. Since it can be literally hundreds of dollars per prescription difference.
So the pharma companies went "have trouble paying for your meds? Here have this $40 off coupon" So now I the insurance customer can go to the pharmacy and get the generic costing me $20 and my Insurance carrier $50, or I can go get the Name Brand and cost me $10 and my Insurance $200.
Yeah, nobody would ever develop new medicine without the profit motive. Louis Pasteur & Jonas Salk were all about the cash money dollars.
Research for research's sake is so old school! All about the dolla dolla bills yo
You think we would have anywhere near the range of modern medical wonders that we do by depending on the kindness of strangers?
"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing." -- Andrew Jackson
I think we could probably manage it with a strongly state subsidized research sector
Although I think wanting to do away with private pharma is ludicrous because we develop way more stuff than a state model probably would (state funded research should still probably be at parity in terms of dollars, though), they just need to be far more tightly regulated than they are given what's at stake. The problem is trying to regulate them leads to people whining they won't develop medicine if we curtail their profits, but even with very tight regulation and even price controls on some drugs there are absolutely astounding amounts of money to be made
Yes, I think we would have just as robust, if not a much more robust, range of 'medical wonders' if we recognized that many of the best minds are more interested in fundamental research (Pasteur) or defeating an adversary (Salk) than just making money. Do you even have a counterpoint or counterexample that compares to the genesis of germ theory or the development of the Polio vaccine that was accomplished via the much-vaunted Profit Motive (TM) ?
Statins.
That's right. All of them.
The only people benefited by IP treaties are the US. Even your allies like Australia get massively shafted by any "free trade" agreement you get us to sign. In every case it's a case of us agreeing to honour your IP and you telling us fuck off when we ask you to respect ours.