“Corporate rip-off:” White House slams Big Pharma’s drug price reform attacks
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Marijuana used to be $300-400 an ounce in Massachusetts before legalization. Now you can get an ounce for $80 as a medical patient, and it will be nearly twice as strong as it used to be. There have been a consistent stream of price cuts in this state for all marijuana products for the past several years. Retail prices on concentrates were just cut by nearly 50% a couple of weeks ago. Generally speaking, these cost around $1 per milligram before, now if you buy the right concentrate, it's less than 4 cents per milligram.
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Not true.
Germany:
Switzerland:
New Zealand:
Japan:
The situation in Belgium and the Netherlands is complicated.
Do all these countries have broad, government-subsidized and regulated healthcare? Yes. Do they have single-payer systems? No.
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Is that why rich people spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on sports cars they can't drive safely instead of a cheap safe car? Capitalists are as emotional as anyone. It's just that those emotions are massively narcissistic and antisocial.
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I agree with some of what you say, but not everything.
I don't believe for a second that Janssen spent a billion dollars developing Spravato. It's the S enantiomer of ketamine. Ketamine has been known for decades. It was being used off-label for depression for years before Janssen started trials.
I'm sure those trials and all the associated regulatory costs were expensive. Many tens of millions. But a billion? I can't believe it (though I'd be happy to be proven wrong).
I also disagree that big pharma isn't inefficient. There are periodic reorganizations, site closings, layoffs, etc (followed by new sites, site expansions, acquisitions...). that must cost enormous amounts of money, and definitely look on the outside like executives trying to show they're worth their salary.
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Apart from Switzerland, they do (as we do here in Australia), but it's not a government monopoly.
Personal health insurance is a premium you can pay for certain services, which can also help with tax benefits. In the end, you can rely on state services if you need to. The government run healthcare has enormous buying power for medical services and products, which in the end is the entire point
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The ACA created exchanges where you can buy good insurance outside of your employment. How does 35% equate to "most"?
I've had good low-deductible plans through the exchange.
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You are missing the key point about single payer or government healthcare. You pay tax. Here in Australia it is means tested, so if you're in the lower tax brackets, you don't pay any healthcare tax. If you're middle class you might pay $1000 (AUD) a year
You don't have to have health insurance, unless you want it for specific needs/wants (elective surgery etc). You don't need to deal with insurance companies and claims and policies. You go see your doctor for a small fee, and they will refer you to specialists etc. Your out of pocket expenses are tiny.
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Did you miss the part I quoted where Japanese healthcare consumers pay 30% of the bill?
You're massively oversimplifying the way healthcare is funded in many countries.
Is healthcare in other developed countries more government regulated and subsidized than in the US? Yes. Do they all (not even including Switzerland) have single payer? No.
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You can add to those, "drown them in technicalities." For example, "Wookiee" has two e's.
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When examined in a vacuum, this is true. It allows keen minds to stay gainfully employed at and focused on the discovery and creation of new technologies and ideas, while letting other people work out the details of how to produce and market them. Where it breaks down is the duration of exclusivity, and how lucrative they're allowed to be, without even a shred of effort required to ensure that exclusivity being enjoyed is actually being used to best serve the public who fund that exclusivity.
America's cult-like obsession with the imagined holy sanctity of capital is at the root of so many problems...
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I wish idiots would understand what journalism entails. Seems we’re both doomed to disappointment. Go figure.
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That Stephen Ubl guy looks like the villain in every single Bond movie. If what he said didn’t make absolutely no sense (patents lower drug prices? LOL), just looking at him should tell you he’s lying to your face.
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You seem to think we're arguing about whether single payer and/or universal healthcare is good. I'm all for single payer healthcare. I don't think that we in the US would do a good job of making the more complicated German/Swiss/Japanese/Dutch systems work.
What I'm arguing about is your assertion that all developed countries have single payer healthcare. That isn't true. A number of OECD countries have private insurers. Insurance is mandatory, regulated, and generally nonprofit, but it isn't directly managed by the government.
Of course, the ACA originally made private insurance mandatory and more regulated in the US. But the US healthcare system has more problems than just insurance.
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Free El Chapo and put him in charge of big Pharma conglomerate. you'll see results
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100% empirical proof that the current system results in HIGHER prices:
Drugs in the USA are 3-200x higher than Every.Single.Other.Country Even third world countries have cheaper access to these medications!
The US has the highest pricing of drugs on earth. But Pharma will claim that 'somehow' if the law stays as it is, prices will drop. somehow. magically.
probably when the head of Pfizer is kissed by a prince and turns into a non-money grubbing asshole!
Drugs in the USA are 3-200x higher than Every.Single.Other.Country Even third world countries have cheaper access to these medications!
The US has the highest pricing of drugs on earth. But Pharma will claim that 'somehow' if the law stays as it is, prices will drop. somehow. magically.
probably when the head of Pfizer is kissed by a prince and turns into a non-money grubbing asshole!
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As a poet once said. "Look upon my profits, ye sick people, and expire".
Well something like that anyway.
Well something like that anyway.
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ResemblesPrison
Ars Centurion
That 35% overlaps with the cheapest plans, and the plans most available to individuals relying on income based subsidies, that represent the majority of people working for the most common wages in the US (30-35k), rendering them effectively useless.
Your objection amounts to “I had a sandwhich today so how is anyone hungry?”. It typifies the common sentiment that “I got mine so everything is fine”.
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ResemblesPrison
Ars Centurion
I watched it play out in real time for one.
It’s easy to buy into the pageantry, but the cause is really quite simple; our system of bought and sold elected officials, who once elected abandon any pretense of representation and can’t be recalled by the people, worked tirelessly with lobbyists and wealthy donors to create a system that only benefits the ruling class.
The same ruling class that openly buy whatever favorable legislation they want, again, through lobbyists (so it isn’t corruption!), and are unilaterally supported by a court captured by the wealthy from the local to Supreme Court.
Hope that helps
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Praetorian
For the drug price discrepancy? That's easy enough to establish and you don't need me to point you towards an over-the-counter or prescription cost comparison.
As to the audit results? No, for the same reason that we can not know the exact breakdowns of R&D expenses in the US. An audit of this kind is closed and the information handed over to authorities such as national statistics centres and similar are under strict secrecy/confidentiality. What comes out of it, however, is aggregated information which once again points to a self-evident conclusion.
There have been think tanks who have gone through the data in Sweden at least. The conclusion is that much of national pharma is outsourced to universities and the "R&D investments" show up as grants to university researchers who perform the bulk of the core research.
Leading to a whole mess of concerns, most of which would be centered around to which extent partially tax funded research is handed over, in the form of patents, to pharma companies to develop further.
To address an elephant in the room of your statements above, however;
That's an assertion incredibly hyped and pushed by the pharma lobby. It's a talking point which has no backing what so ever.
And this is also self-evident bullshit.
Pharma companies don't have to do business outside of the US. If the european price controls/negotiations are a net loss, why do the pharma companies keep selling to those places? No one has a gun to the head of Pfizer telling them they need to sell medicine to the EU at a net loss - and in fact, the CEO would in such a case be forced to cut that market off.
I.e. your theory is disproven by the simplest nonpartisan logic. It's a lie which assumes that pharma companies are willing to eat a massive net loss in several markets. A lie told so often it's become normalized even among those who ought to know better.
The US isn't subsidizing anything of the sort, because if any company eats a net loss in a market then they leave that market. That's how basic capitalism works. It is, however, very much in the interest of pharma companies to push a narrative so twisted it resembles what Big Tobacco used to say about the "Benefits of smoking".
Finally, about R&D...did you know that a substantial competitor to Big Pharma in the area of vaccines and cheap cures used to be third world countries such as Cuba? Biology research tends not to consume vast sums. Compared to NASA and other forms of research demanding precision tooling and high-rarity materials, bio-research is incredibly cheap. Hell, Cuba actually did build a Covid vaccine which, even if not quite as effective as that of the mainline labels, did save massive amounts of lives. And they produced that on publicly available research and a shoestring budget.
The entire premise that you need enormous sums of money to perform biological R&D is a falsehood in the first place. Again proven by the most basic logic of looking at similar results being produced by comparative ramshackle operations outside of the US.
So why is R&D considered such a vast expense post specifically in the US? My own personal theory is that pharma wants to keep that number as high as possible and has, similar to Hollywood accounting, a massive shell game going to circulate "R&D" money internally until they're either funnelled straight back into the company while still presenting a nominal "cost" to be presented to the IRS - or in the acquisition of assets which serve dual use (a research center doubling as a dormitory for staff, or including offices for legal and finance, for example).
We'll never know what exactly is done with the money unless an audit is somehow leaked, but we can still look at comparative research having been made by outfits a lot smaller which still produce sufficient results to be competitive and know that there's something fundamentally wrong with the numbers presented on the spreadsheet.
So...Your fundamental premises are wrong. This renders a lot of your argumentation invalid.
Finally to address this bit;
That calculation has been performed a great many times - in fact, there was a time when the US was the frontrunner of price capping and regulation. I advise you look at what is today called a golden era of the US - postwar america, under FDR. Taxes were at 90% at the highest bracket. Social services, minimum wage, unionization...all at the peak. As was the booming economy.
As those - by any reckoning, incredibly socialist - measures were gradually dismantled the result became one of wealth concentration. Leading, in the end, to the dystopian shitpit you're in now where the average american, even the erudite one, takes for granted that you need to bribe the already wealthy with the guarantee of outrageous roi's unless they threaten to take their money and leave.
And what led y'all to this point was the tacit assumption that billionaires, banks and hedge fund managers being allowed to plunder the public purse unhindered is the only way you can gain prosperity. It's not, as your own past proves conclusively.
If you tell every investor they get to look at a 2:1 or 3:1 roi instead of a 10:1 or 20:1, do you think they'll stop investing? Stop making money even if the money earned is less?
Other investors will. The market should apply in the investment sector as well - yet it doesn't, right now.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Praetorian
As I keep saying, the most generally prosperous era in the US - the golden age where a single breadwinner could support an entire family and the middle class was the major part of the population - was under FDR, in a system where unionization was ubiquitous, social services and living minimum wages were a thing, and taxes could reach 90% for the highest income brackets for both people and corporations.
The current dystopia has grown concomitant to the rate at which these fairly socialist mechanisms were dismantled.
Capital will still be invested at maximum rates if the roi is 2:1 rather than 20:1, and the nation as a whole will be much healthier when the purpose of the currency and economy is that of production rather than ending up in Scrooge McDuck's money vault.
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Yes. The German university we in-licensed from is getting a very, very healthy royalty.
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