Every company does that, or they don’t stay in business. Think about it for half a second.
If the fact that the drug business is high-risk-high-return bothers you, the only fix for that is going to be a genuine public health system that includes a research arm, where we all share the risk and the benefits. And even then you’re going to wind up with some drugs being developed in the private sector under the basic capitalist model.
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Not extracting the maximum profit from your work is immoral according to the market.
OR we develop new drugs through funding more university research and enjoy just paying what it costs to DO the actual research and what it cost to make the drug. Imagine that, paying the people who do the actual work, rather than supporting a system that makes ultra-rich speculators the ultimate winners. HAHAHA! that’s silly isn’t it? It’s like socialized medicine; It doesn’t really exist here in the US so it obviously can’t ever work. Right?
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That was mentioned in the GP as an option. It would be a fine idea. I should point out, though, that most of the new drugs come from systems like ours, not like what you’re describing. I think a good way to work it might be to have a system like you describe, and also let corporations make and market drugs however they want. We’d have to eliminate the ability of corporations to corrupt lawmakers for that to work, though.
If it costs $10000 for 10000 bad widgets, you don’t attempt to offset the cost of that by changing the price of your $1 gidgets from $1.50 each to $3.00 if people won’t pay $3 for a gidget.
It’s Econ 101: The price of goods and services is a function of supply and demand. Things like loss-leaders notwithstanding, this is the primary consideration made in determining the price of a good or service. In many cases, it is the only consideration. The market for drugs is unique because supply can be artificially controlled through patent enforcement and because the barriers to entry for alternative drugs are so high. It’s also unique because the end-users are often shielded from the true price of the drug.
A company’s overall profitability is a consideration, but due to factors that exceed the scope of human ability to prognosticate, you cannot rely on the price to compensate for losses. It’s not the main factor affecting price because at the end of the day, there’s simply a limit to what people will or can pay. It becomes a social problem when the market itself is full of artificial constructs and is highly regulated. The solution may not be within my grasp personally. But, I do think it makes no sense to look at this already extremely manipulated market and throw your hands over your eyes, walk off a cliff, and hope the Invisible Hand catches you.
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How did that make it onto the statute books? It seems bizarre.
Are monopolies compatible with “the market”?
Development cost is ALWAYS part of the over-the-counter cost of a product.
If a company doesn’t think people will pay for it, they don’t develop the product. Is that an improvement?
Prove it.
Shouldn’t need proving. If a company doesn’t at least recoup its costs, it loses money. Unless it’s being run as a nonprofit with folks willing to continue pouring money into the leaky pot, it loses the ability to do anything and goes out of business.
Price you pay includes your share of everything from the salesclerk who rang it up back to the guys who mined the raw materials (and recursively back farther, though as you go back your share is progressively more diluted by others sharing the resource).
That’s how an economy works. Whether you’re paying in money or in anything else.
I’m not saying that ALL you’re paying is the actual costs of production and delivery…Most businesses, as I said, want to make a profit; even nonprofits may want to retain some funds to reinvest in being able to serve more people and developing the next project. If you want to complain about excessive profits, that’s fair. But you can’t justify “excessive” until you can account for the legitimate portion… and some of that includes the cost of efforts that failed before they reached the customers; again, unless someone pays for that the company stops being able to produce anything.
You can’t produce something out of nothing. You can shift who pays and how they pay. You can discuss how net profits should be distributed along the chain and how much net profit is or isn’t fair for any given contribution. But the legitimate costs are the legitimate costs. Starvation doesn’t produce anything.
Ahhhh! But you mus’ve missed the part where it said the drug would sold much more cheaply in Asia. Just last year, the courts in India told Merck to go stuff when they also wanted their patents extended on cancer drugs.
The answer is clear - if you get Hep C before the price comes down - go to India. Despite all the stuff you saw about the poor and sick there (which is true), you probably saw nothing on India also being cutting edge on tech (forthcoming high-tech medical stuff is being developed there), and offering first-rate medical care at a price that won’t buy you groceries in the west. You could d the trip, live like a queen, and come back well.
None of it surprises me. We constantly calc the value of virtually everything in this country by productive labor lost, or by dollars gained - not lives, not quality of living those lives. This country (as such) doesn’t give a damn about lives, unless they are employable. They even speak of Medicare and Social Security as ‘entitlements’ which need to be cut, even though we work and pay into accounts under our own names.
They’re more than compatible, they’re the natural evolution of any pure market. Eventually the winner gets big enough that they can buy or dominate all competitors.
Stopped reading there.
Campaign contributions. Also, Republicans. Go back and read the headlines from 2005 - it seemed bizarre then too.
100% of hep C people can obviously find $84,000+++.
I always get big pharma companies and the hippocratic oath all ethically tangled up - it’s a personal failing.
Yes, but they obviously joined in the price-spiralling fray to get the price of the company they bought up to that figure.
That’s the problem - most everybody on the planet bar their investors is disgusted at the way pharma works.
Ask any doctor.
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