It’s so Catbert… I love it. Yeah, it’s possible.
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I would put it even more simple terms: if your business depends upon making profits off of finding and/or making cures, then you are in the wrong business. The prime motivation for a pharmaceutical company should not be making money.
Alas, post-Reagan economics only sees dollars (or euros, or yen) as a valid measurement of success. Too many believe the lie that the only things stakeholders should care about is increasing monetary value.
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“If money is all you love, then that’s what you’ll receive.” - Leia Organa, Star Wars (1977)
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after 25 years in acute care social services I found the terms “caring & helping” are quite relative to one’s status.
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That’s interesting - I stand corrected. But, in my defense, is it fair to say that you were using already approved drugs, not doing drug development?
PS - $20M - wow! Too bad they don’t give residuals :>D
Mostly, but not entirely.
My work was based around 4-methylmethcathinone, which is not approved by anyone. It’s a nasty party drug, not medicine.
One of the other guys in the lab was working on developing oxytocin as an addiction therapy for methamphetamine users. That was a pre-existing drug (actually a hormone/neurotransmitter, but in nasal spray form), but without any proven medical use at the time.
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It tickles my memory that someone already wrote a book with tjis as the premise. Michael Crichton maybe?
I know, some of them haven’t had a bath in weeks!
But Ebenezer, who then would provide the desperate young starlets, illegal nannies and groundskeepers, and other exploitable meatpuppets that serve the Bright Elect?
Oh, ha ha, Governor Moonbeam! He’s almost as laughable as a Green Party candidate! Everyone knows only the anti-human parties can win an election!
Melinda, of course.
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Until the basis for medical education changes, carrying $200k or more in debt before earning a dime does tend to focus one’s mind on finances. I don’t look at it as “love of money” but more love of living indoors and eating regularly. Add to that the innate feeling that one’s value in society should somewhat reflect one’s value to society and you understand my issue here.
An easy point to prove. Those who care for children are consistently valued less than equivalent positions caring for adults. Pediatricians are the lowest paid medical specialty, elementary school teachers are paid less than high school teachers are paid less than college professors. Daycare providers are generally minimum wage. Where is the biggest societal impact? Those who actually produce goods and services are valued far less than those who move the money thus produced. F***ed up society.
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I was helping to answer your daughter’s question, in that unlike doctors, lawyers and anyone else offering a service that is otherwise highly valued, the finance types only think about money. There really is nothing else in their world.
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Social democracy is a mixed economic theory, which is both socialist and capitalist in close to equal amounts, usually leaning slightly towards socialism. The big problem with third way liberalism which has dominated for the last 30 years is that it consistently favoured capitalism over socialism, creating the precarious working class we have today.
Social democracy isn’t communism though, which is deliberately confused with socialism by the right.
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The coded message of publicly funded healthcare is: “It’s nice to have you around.”
I know - poison Americans via industrial food production, then rent them the antidotes. That’s what I call a sustainable business model!
Why we must smash capitalism, exhibit Z.
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I think we mostly agree about the premise. The targets are primarily discovered by academia and government-funded research. Pharma companies take it from discovery to development and commercialization. The latter part is expensive, as there is a lot of dropout. But I haven’t noticed pharma companies lacking profit.
~60% of drug discovery-type instruments (protein purification, NGS, chromatography/mass spec) are sold into academia or publicly-funded research. That’s where the innovative work is being done here. The (expensive, time-consuming) part of the work that is done by pharma companies is really just factory work.
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Apologies. My bad. This is an argument I hear frequently, that goes “your job is so valuable, you save lives and ease pain. How could you cheapen it by asking for money?” I thought that was where you were going. Struck a nerve a bit.
Not sure why “lobbyist” has become such a dirty word. The Human Rights Campaign are lobbyists. The Sierra Club are lobbyists, labor unions are lobbyists. We have a representative system here in the USA – you wanna get something done in congress? Probably good to gang together with a bunch of like-minded folks and… lobby!
I do understand you are talking about “not good lobbyists” like the NRA, of which there are many. The not-so-great politicians who are swayed by them? Very much the responsibility of the citizenry, who vote them into power again and again, often against their own interests. I would rather we get the citizenry doing good things, versus privatizing the tax system via massive tax-deductible contributions given to the .01% (one percent of the one percent).
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Ah, but these are not purely lobbyists. The archetypical lobbyist is more of a mercenary: not fighting for a cause but for the money. It is a common trope for the lobbyist to not have any beliefs but only wants to win for the sake of getting a reputation as a winner, and doesn’t care who his clients are. Many a John Grisham novel, many a film has been made showing the lobbyist not blinking an eye at corruption until the client does something really, really scuzzy.
Which circles back to medicine as a business where the profits are more important than the patients, in a way.
I resigned from a health care lobbying group (most of its members were non-profit corporations) after two state elections where their leadership quite openly told us that they were going to try to figure out in advance who would win the election and then get behind that candidate as early as possible.
