Comment by bediger4000
6 hours ago
But of a paywall there, can't tell if raw materials and precursors are costing more, or R&D spend is up, or employee wages and salaries have risen. Those are usually the "pressures" on prices. I can't understand what or who might be applying "pressure" to lower prices on oligopolistic pharmaceutical makers.
big Pharma has properties unlike many other business. The R&D is very, very expensive and, income is not directly related to expenses each year. The natural "moat" is such that only a relatively few, giant and wealthy, companies exist over time.
ref- The Billion Dollar Molecule
> big Pharma has properties unlike many other business. The R&D is very, very expensive and, income is not directly related to expenses each year
Isn’t this any capital-intensive business with variable demand?
Why does the US consumer of said medications subsidize many other countries who have access to the same medications for a fraction of the US sticker price?
Lots of reasons. One of them is that other countries negotiate deals country wide and can get bulk discounts. The US does this with the VA and Medicare, and people using those services generally pay less than the rest of Americans. In the end, it is largely a policy choice, as having a single payer could get better negotiated deals on drugs.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/how-medicare-negot...
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"If Canada is getting a 30% discount we can make it up by baking it into the hundreds of smaller negotiations with American providers."
Drug maker thinking
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Nobody's forcing US pharama companies to sell to those countries at those prices, they choose to, because it makes them more money.
Foreigners aren't the reason American healthcare sucks. Stop looking for people to blame abroad, all the sources of your problems are in the presidency, congress, and in the boardroom that directs the former.
Americans really love to tell themselves they are paying for others. You victimize yourselves, and then blame externalities. Fix you own issues.
This is not like IT where the Americans are completely dominant and clearly superior.
The European pharma companies are doing more than fine, despite their main market being heavily regulated and price-controlled.
The less charitable explanation is that US companies want to charge outrageous prices, and the American system let them to, so they do it.
That's what the USA are: a machine to prioritize profits over people. Sometimes it turns out fine, like for the startup scene. Sometimes it's terrible, like when lives at stake.
Other explanations sound like heavy copium to me.
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Because US voters prefer the free market as opposed to government regulation and nationalized healthcare.
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If you pitched a pharma company with the thesis of "We'll charge US customers less and global customers more", what would stop that from working?
I can think of a number of things.
Except many (most?) pharmas spend more on marketing and sales than R&D. Lobbying is another big expense for most of them.
Rueters doesn't show a paywall for me. The source of the pressure described is in the headline though. I'm not sure why OP editorialized it (as it is against hn guidelines): Exclusive: Drugmakers raise US prices on 350 medicines despite pressure from Trump.
> not sure why OP editorialized it
The article is about drug pricing, which is the part I found interesting (and by extension thought we’d find interesting). I thought taking it out both saved space and made the comments less likely to veer into flamebait.
Thanks for filling that in. I, too, am interested in this topic, because the oligopolistic market in the US, and the multinational corporations in the oligopoly, cause unusual, counter-intuitive and counter-doctrinal economic results. We're not in a recession or depression, so I was curious about causes of downward pressure on prices.
There's a character limit on the titles you can submit, probably wasn't intentionally editorializing. I assumed from the HN title that the pressure was from the Trump admin just based on the current state of US politics.
Char limit is 80, the full title would fit, even with “Exclusive”.
I think its obvious: theres a LOT of love for Trump here in VC circles. So anything speaking ill of his laughable policies, EO's, and other garbage is -1'ed or flagged to oblivion.
If you choose to self censor a headline for fear of getting voted down on news.ycombinator.com, that says as much about you as the -1ers.
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Ironically the past 6 months now all the political content is just insta dead flagged and removed, the love isn't lost but nobody wants to be the one responsible for defending it.
I'm sure Trump pressure will soon bring those 1000% savings on pharmaceuticals, just hold on.