Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds
thenation.com
thenation.com
They made $18bn in profit. And the founder is with $6bn.
That’s plenty of credit.
I'm talking, of course, of the public that paid for the development and roll-out of the vaccines.
Even if one believes that vaccines deserve all the credit for returning the world back to normalcy, Big pharma didn't save us. Scientists and other staff directly involved in R&D deserve the credit and they would continue to exist even if their work was organized in another, more efficient manner. I find it quite disturbing when the role of profiteering corporations is glorified like that.
> 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds
> Ads often tout new, pricey drugs that are not much better than old, cheaper ones.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/most-prescription-dr...
Also:
> The US is one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials. (The other is New Zealand.)
[0] - https://www.fda.gov/drugs/prescription-drug-advertising/basi...
The company that makes it is publicly traded so I looked up their financials. The drug is a generic and the patent expired decades ago. Very little is spent on “R&D”. Almost all of their money goes to “advertising”.
I use a daily medication. Every time I got to get t he script filled I get asked if I want the brand name or the generic. There is a two or three times price difference, why would I ever get the brand name?
"Now a word from our sponsor: Crapitab - ask your doctor for a reason to take it! (Warning: stop taking Crapitab immediately if you experience any of the following symptoms, including but not limited to: insomnia, rash, multiple organ failure, breathing cessation, prolonged unconsciousness, or death.)"
If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and then you try to quadruple the price of what you're producing after you've already sold billions of units at a nice tidy profit, yes, that's greedy.
If pharmaceutical companies were free market entities who took all of the risk of developing new drugs, then it might be justifiable for them to charge whatever the market will bear. But that's not how drug research works in our society; in our society, we already pay for much of the research with our taxes, so pharma companies that are doing parts of the research and producing the drugs are not operating in a free market. They are benefiting from government largesse, and there are limitations that go along with that.
And exemption from all legal liability for your product even if due to quality control issues during manufacturing....
I don't know if there was a study done for the Moderna vaccine funding, but the AstraZeneca vaccine research was 97% publicly funded, so "much" is an understatement.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...
There would be limitations if those governments involved weren't populated almost entirely by corporate owned puppets.
It’s not hypocritical; when your life literally depends on something, and they have a monopoly on the only thing that will save your life, it’s absolutely greedy to try and maximize profits.
When Apple overcharges for an iPhone, there are a few things that make this less evil:
1. There are lots of different smartphones out there that you have the option to buy instead. Even when I worked at Apple I found it surprisingly easy to get by on an Android for my first three months.
2. I don’t die when I don’t have an iPhone.
Not justifying Martin or excessive pharma prices but it really is the case that we should disabuse ourselves from the notion that one should be entitled to life-saving care.
That process comes with a lot of externalities. Most drugs are incredibly costly to manufacture in terms of environmental damage (petrochemical solvents and cosolvents, water for purification, etc). I loved my dad but when he was dying I remember wondering why our society was bearing the ~100k per week cost because he didn't want to die. When mom was too weak to pull the plug I stepped in and made the hard (easy?) choice.
I couldn't disagree more. If it truly is life-saving (as opposed to death-prolonging) care, we really should _dedicate_ ourselves to the notion that each of us should be entitled to life-saving care. That should be an explicit part of the social contract.
Oh, and btw, society was NOT paying ~100k to keep your dad alive. Assuming you're here in the U.S., if you were looking at medical bills to figure out that number, SURPRISE! those numbers are just made up. (Seriously, they're fiction)
That's not to say that you made the wrong choice with your dad, mind you. We do tend to prolong life way past the point of cruelty in this country.
You should do some research on medical billing and R&D costs in pharmaceutical development; those are two totally different things.
It's also a fact that the real cutting-edge R&D is invariably funded by taxpayers, while pharmaceutical companies spend their budgets creating patentable variants, often cherry-picking studies to show marginal improvements over existing drugs. You should do some research on that, too.
I can’t imagine this point of view being very popular in places where universal health care is available.
And personally, I can’t imagine living in a place where it isn’t.
It’s fine to charge cost plus some nice profit.
But trying to maximise the price in a medical context is morally equivalent to finding a person dying in the desert and making them sign all their assets over to you before giving them water.
And I can find studies like: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126
> In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on R&D. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s.
What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and services that are working less and less.
I don't think e.g. phone service is comparable, because while you might not pay when the service is down, the service's uptime doesn't depend on you. If you destroy your cell phone, you can't use the service, but the service is still working.
If you sold "medicine as a service", it would just include that, but it couldn't guarantee that you'd always be healthy, no matter what choices you made.
Whereas with medicine, people will sit there and let the system slowly and agonisingly fail them over and over again, at tremendous personal expense, until they are literally dead.
Medical malpractice - that is, a medical professional getting their treatment provably wrong to the point it causes death instead of prevents it - has been a leading cause of death (in the top 5) for decades.
It's somewhat of an inversion of capitalism that such a dysfunction persists in just this one area.
Your analogy with cellphones doesn't relate this because cellphones work.
If instead, they also ranked top 5 out of all failed any-distance communications methods, alongside smoke-signals, pigeons, cans-on-a-string and megaphones, development would be focused on until they rank better.
When medical malpractice ranks in the bottom 5 causes of death, the positive mechanisms of capitalism will be functioning in this area.
So do humans. But sometimes both of them stop working, or some part of them stops working. The service provider will not care if you break your cellphone, they only provide the cell service.
The problem with the idea of "you pay a flat fee for your health, and someone else makes sure you're healthy" doesn't work unless you also give them control over most of your life: what and how much (and when?) you eat, when and how much you sleep, any other substance you (ab-) use, what and how much physical activity you engage in. But who wants that?
Malpractice is a serious issue, but it won't be solved by "payment on success only", you just won't have anyone take on cases that are somewhat complicated, and then litigate forever to define what "success" means.
Something is up with healthcare, and I don't claim to know exactly what it is, or what the solutions would be.
Where I don't agree is your misinterpreting the analogy to self-serve. A cellphone that works as bad as cans on a string is analogous to the healthcare industry working as bad as accidents. No one should put up with either.
But with healthcare, we do.
One way it could be modified would be if doctors had a cap on patients, couldn't refuse to treat their existing ones, and couldn't take on new ones. The cap amount being based on life expectancy balanced against a competitive income.
I would say that excluding people from accessing life saving drugs, is definitely "greedy", even more so if the company has received a massive influx of cash from the government, like Moderna.
I don't really get the outrage here. Barely anyone still needs the vaccine and there's at least one good alternative, so who are they hurting except for themselves because nobody will buy their vaccine now?
Now if Pfizer/BioNTech were to raise the price to a similar level, there would actually be somewhat of a problem (.. for the US government, since they still pay for it, right?).
The next iteration of our society will run on pure ambition: the desire to be better, more knowledgeable or skillful, than others.
I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers. I want founders and early employees in companies that innovate in these spaces to be fabulously wealthy. I want ambitious young people to dream of becoming a billionaire by curing cancer rather thank making a social media app.
I also want to leave money for the rest of the economy, so that doesn’t really leave room for $5200/year/person for 2 COVID shots. (That’s about 7.5% of GDP just for COVID shots if every American gets 2 such shots per year, which is pretty obviously untenable.)
I want citizens to not die of treatable diseases. Our goals seem to be different.
False duality. We can have treatments fairly priced. The only reason that this ones are so expensive is because monopolies and corruption.
In addition, like all technology, there is a tendency to go from something for the very rich to something common.
Successful covid vaccines didn't come from Big Pharma. Moderna and Novartis were not that.
Sure, in an utopian world that would work. But, here on planet Earth, that would massively increase the incentives of fraud. There are already huge issues with this. Increasing the payout by x100 would do more harm than good in this context.