Comment by pfdietz
17 days ago
The rest of the world is free riding.
The solution is a law preventing drug firms from pricing in the US higher than (some small multiple of) what it charges anyone else in the world.
17 days ago
The rest of the world is free riding.
The solution is a law preventing drug firms from pricing in the US higher than (some small multiple of) what it charges anyone else in the world.
> The rest of the world is free riding.
The rest of the world isn't free riding - the USA has just setup a market where there is very little bargaining power for consumers because of how the US medical market and insurance works.
Novo and Eli are still making plenty of money in Europe where these drugs cost a fraction of the price, and where there aren't other significant suppliers for GLP-1's like is being implied.
No, they're free-riding. If drug companies can't charge higher prices in the US, they will do less drug development. Everyone involved in the business/investing side of pharma knows this; it's not even an argument.
I think we have a different definition of free riding.
If you and me both buy the same car, but i'm better at negotiating than you and get a lower price, I'm not free riding because you 'funded the design of the car with the extra money you paid', you are just bad at negotiation.
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Somebody has to pay for the drugs development, the poor can't pay, if the rich (US) won't pay, there simply won't be any drug.
That's why I pay Apple extra money to develop the next big thing. If I only pay the sticker price of the iPhone, there won't be any more innovative products. But if we all get together and pay double the sticker price, we'll get some true innovation!
Nobody is suggesting paying Novo up front, they footed that bill, we are talking about paying a premium after product lunch, which people certainly did for the iPhone.
In a free-market approach to drug development, if the expected loss of attempting to develop as drug is negative, and the cost isn't too high, then there is an incentive to develop that.
The best public policy outcome in such an approach would be for losses to be only slightly negative. Positive or zero expected losses mean no drug development, and highly negative expected losses mean the drug is more expensive than necessary and reduces the accessibility of the drug.
However, current patent law allows companies to minimise their expected loss, with no controls to prevent highly negative expected losses.
There are alternative models - such as state funding of drug development. This model has benefit that it is possible to optimise more directly for measures like QALY Saved (Quality Adjusted Life Years Saved) - which drug sale revenue is an imperfect proxy for due to some diseases being more prevalent amongst affluent people, and because one-time cures can be high QALY Saved but lower revenue.
The complexity of state funding is it still has the free-rider problem at a international level (some states invest less per capita in funding). This is a problem which can be solved to an extent with treaties, and which doesn't need to be solved perfectly to do a lot of good.
Excessive profits from patented drugs are controlled by development of competing drugs. These competitors arise until profits are driven down to the point further development of competitors is inhibited.
The US has zero credibility w.r.t making international treaties these days. And generally is completely set up for a few peoples maximum “expected negative loss”. Sure things could theoretically be structured differently, but for the foreseeable future they aren’t.
The poor can pay for the drug development quite well. It takes a rich country to pay for all the regulatory capture.
Nicely put :)
Nah modern mega corps are free riding on all our backs. They use the power of the state and frivolous mechanisms like the broken patent system to create monopolistic situations for themselves.
Without the patent system the drugs largely don't get invented, so that's a bad argument.
Remind me from whenceforth come Bayer, Novo Nordisk, Moderna?
These are international companies that depend heavily on profits from the American market. Their C suite knows this; their investors know this.
Remind me from whenceforth comes the money that they depend on to make a profit?
The European Central Bank system prints it
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Nope.
That would require those same companies from not abusing our political process to obtain illegal political outcomes - outcomes that are unconstitutional - like Citizens United, which led to PHrMA dumping unimaginable money into bad faith political advertising/lobbying.
Until or unless they stop being bad actors, everyone should pirate their stuff. Free Luigi.
Holy non sequitur, batman.
Whenever someone cites Citizens United, I'm 99.9% sure they have no idea what that ruling was about.
In other words: you are a reactionary who thinks little of others. Noted.
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