Big Pharma Abusing Patent Laws To Seize And Destroy Legal Indian Generic Drugs

A very large multiple? Not more than 3, and often much less.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MRK&fstype=ii

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:JNJ&fstype=ii

If you actually look at the numbers, you'll see that Big Pharma's operating expenses look much like Big Technology.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:INTC&fstype=ii

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii

Note: my 1-3 multiple is actually just the ratio of "Selling/General/Admin. Expenses, Total" / "Research & Development". It's a gratuitous overestimate, since marketing is only a fraction of "Selling/General/Admin. Expenses". That category also includes things like producing drugs, accounting, delivery, etc. But I'm too lazy to look up a more detailed balance sheet.

[edit: I'm curious, why am I being downmodded? All I did was provide some facts.]

> Big Pharma uses their 'research costs money' argument to counter this, but they forget - conveniently - to mention that they spend a very large multiple of their expenses on research for the marketing department.

You say that like it's a bad thing. That's dodgy at best - telling doctors what a drug does seems like a very good thing. Telling consumers that there's a drug that might help with a problem that they have seems like a good thing. (They may not be talking to a doctor about it.)

However, let's go with "it just increases the numbers of people using it". If you're someone who needs that drug, increasing the number of people means that other people are helping to pay for the fixed costs. Since the "good" fixed costs are rather high, that's a good thing for you.

> They abuse the patent system left, right and center in order to extend the income from so called 'blockbuster' drugs at the expense of doing something innovative for a smaller group of people.

(1) There's no such connection. (2) What's stopping you from producing said "innovation"?

A lot of people are quite fond of criticising other people for not doing some "easy" good, yet the critics don't bother to provide said good.

This is interesting, because the domain is almost always one where "good" comes with fairly large financial rewards. If the critics are correct, they're not doing an easy good that would both provide them with considerable money (which they could use to do more good) and drive bad people out of biz.

I'm not saying the current system in US/Europe is efficient or even acceptable but it is a model that has produced novel therapeutics in the past. I think we can agree that the price is too high but hopefully we can also agree that benefits have been gained from those novel therapeutics.

I got the impression that the article was generally anti-patents and I framed my response in that context. A ban on patents has been beneficial for the generics industry but if it has a higher cost in terms of stifling novel therapeutics, which also have a benefit, then it may be an overall loss for the population as a whole. In this way there is little difference between a ban on patents being good for the generics industry and strong copyright laws being good for the record industry. Both may be true but the interests of the population may not be aligned perfectly with these industries.

On the other hand if research into novel therapeutics is able to thrive with a ban on patents then you get the benefits of new therapies and the affordable prices. This is what I would like to see before dismissing the patent system entirely when what may be best is a little tweaking.

Finally on marketing versus R&D I'm not sure that the multiple could genuinely said to be 'very large.' This article suggests marketing:R&D is 2:1. http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

There was a note about someone alleging the drugs were counterfeit. There could have been more details around that - who alleged it and why? Note that I am not siding with big pharma here - far from it. I am siding with balanced reporting.