Comment by exporectomy
5 years ago
The US (and Canada) invents more drugs than the rest of the world combined. Maybe Americans are paying the price for all those other countries to get those better outcomes cheaper and without their sacrifice, everybody would lose.
Are we seeing better outcomes, though?
Because the USA pays massively more than anyone else for its medicine, it's logical that the USA has more pharma industry, producing more medicine, than anyone else.
But because the US Pharma industry is profit-driven, as TFA says, it is interested in making only profitable medicine. And as TFA says, curing things may not be profitable.
If the USA adopted socialised medicine, would we see less drugs but better outcomes? Would the pharma industry get more spread out, and less focused on making vast piles of cash in the USA and more focused on actual cures for everyone?
Put it like this: does a hypothetical Indian biochemistry genius with a passion for solving hard pharmaceutical problems work on some interesting but tricky disease in India that could save millions of lives, or do they go to the USA to earn lots of money creating expensive drugs for not-so-many rich people that doesn't even cure them?
It's easy to talk about this "sacrifice" until you have an American friend or family member with a serious chronic health condition. There's no reason to financially ruin sick people and their caretakers for the benefit of private drug companies.
In any case, the basic research behind >90% of US drug inventions is publicly-funded, with private companies productizing this research and reaping huge profits:
>This report shows that NIH funding contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. Collectively, this research involved >200,000 years of grant funding totaling more than $100 billion.
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/10/2329
Not saying it's right, just that perhaps American people are paying a price to help everyone else - for whatever reason the system ended up in that state.
Expensive treatments only seem bad when they're just about within reach then people pour all their money into it. Normal people just get old and die because there's nothing available to save them at any price.
It's a bit of both in my country with free healthcare because some treatments aren't funded by the government so poor people just die or endure the chronic condition while those who can afford it have the option to pay full price like those unfortunate Americans.
So you're saying that by having worse and more expensive health outcomes ourselves, we're helping everyone else? My God, those highly compensated medical company CEOs and their boards and shareholders are heroes!
The US are the dominant science and technology power in all domains and pharma companies also make good profits in Europe. I'm not sure that there is a causation here.
How many of those drugs are actually used by people outside the U.S. though? I am genuinely curious.
Almost all of those drugs are used by people outside the US. Sometimes regulatory processes delay approval in other countries but very few get denied.
same
the pharma drugs investment sees returns for pharma drugs investors.. USA has the highest prescription medication prices in the entire world, not even close. Who can buy them?
And not only drugs, much of the progress in other types of treatments (e.g. surgery) also comes from US.
Rangers, lead the way!