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Comment by blkhawk | Hacker News Reader

not having read the blog post I can at least say that it doesn't pass the smell test for me. The fact alone that the price disparity is not "africa" and "the rest of the world" but rather "the rest of the world" and the "USA" makes that very unlikely as a direct conclusion.

Many countries that are comparitively rich should see similar high prices. This is not the case. Also when looking at the develpment costs of some of the most expensive drugs the high prices are simply not justified.

Especially in cases where the main costs for a manufacturer is marketing because development was fully or partially financed from public money.

I mean aside from insulin the epipen price hikes are also well known about. As manufacturing technics improve and whatever cost overheads are payed off the prices should go down for all drugs. This is not the case at all somehow.

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Other rich countries have price controls. If the US had the same price controls, all else equal, the economics of pharmaceutical research would fall apart. Whether that would be bad or good is certainly up for debate, but my personal view is that it would be bad.

But it wouldn't be necessary to leave all else equal, if we introduced the same kind of price controls. The idea I think seems interesting is to do more research funding via large public prizes, rather than primarily grants and profits. Unfortunately it sounds pretty untenable, politically, to me, to set these prizes high enough to encourage a similar amount of research as the profit motive does. It's hard for me to envision a like $3B prize for "create a really good weight loss drug" having been politically feasible, for instance.

What price controls other countries have allow for profits that are more than healthy. And I don't think that the economics of pharmaceutical research are all that closely coupled to the prices of drugs in the US. The apparent profit margin of the US parma industry is just too high for that - I have seen 70% cited compared to ~20% in other countries. [Source:https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/research/flow-of-money-through-...]

Lets just think about your 3B weighloss thing leaving out complications like its a spherical cow in a vaccum - there are enough overweight people in the world that if you can sell enough of it to each of them at a 10USD profit in total you easily make that back. Imagine what a 20usd per cured overweight person profit would do. isn't doubling your money enough? And considering that new potentially overweight people are born every day it would be a perpetual (spherical) cash cow.

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