Yes. But even though there isn’t right now, that doesn’t mean that the government bears any responsibility whatsoever for this jerk deciding to try to rip off sick people. Zero. Nada. Which is the issue that started this whole tangent.
is a homeopathic version available?
I don’t know about that. The people who make and sustain such regulations should understand the unintended consequences of such regulations and do something about it. It doesn’t take a genius to know that something like this could happen.
I don’t think the government bears responsibility for this guy deciding to hike the price. But that isn’t what started this tangent. This was:
This is an example of unintended side effects of regulation. When people use legal means to maximize their personal utility I think more about the system that creates the environment that allows that behavior. IOW, don’t hate the player, hate the game.
What a load of crap. Legal is not synonymous with moral, so any player has the option to play the game legally and morally. Playing the game legally and immorally isn’t the game’s fault, it is the player’s.
I don’t disagree with any of that, except for the ‘load of crap’ part. This person bears responsibility for his actions. But it’s not like he’s unique, this practice of finding drugs that fit this fact pattern has been going on for a little while now. Probably some combination of the magnitude of the price hike and the douchey-ness of the guy makes this story gain traction.
Legal isn’t moral. Morality cannot be legislated. So this guy is an asshole - but I guess I don’t find much interest in thinking about this one guy, but more about the entire system and regulatory framework that exists that make it so this guy’s assholishness is rewarded.
It’s an ‘unintended consequence’ of regulations that prohibit alternatives that are widely available.
It’s also an ‘unintended consequence’ of the lack of regulations (consumer safeguards).
It’s a symptom and a disease of our for-profit healthcare system.
No, it’s not. Without the “for profit” part, it’s quite possible this drug would never have been invented in the first place. A little humility is needed here. Too many people think the can manage the economy for the good of the people, but societies that have eliminated the profit motive do not have a good track record of providing people with what they want and need.
What if we eliminated the profit motive and kept everything else the same. I don’t know how you do that.
There are a lot of important drugs were developed in countries with publicly-funded health care systems.
Right, this guy does something wrong and you want to change the subject. I’m saying that’s ridiculous.
Feel free to discuss whatever aspect you like. I don’t find the vilification angle that interesting myself but the regulatory framework is interesting to me. Like you said - this tangent about unintended consequences is how we started. If that didn’t come up I doubt I’d participate in the other aspects. I mean, how many ways is there to call the guy a dick?
Fair. I’m sure we’ll hear about it if someone finds otherwise.
I don’t. Government policy shouldn’t be set punitively because we don’t like this guy.
I am in favor of generally allowing importation of drugs that have been approved in Europe, though. Their safety and regulatory body is as good as the FDA.
Not sure what you mean here Johnny LA - loads of drugs have been invented in the UK over the years, for example, where we have the National Health Service. But they weren’t discovered by the UK government or some sort of ‘state laboratory’, they were invented the same way they are in the US, by private enterprise.
There are some examples of drugs coming out of a public research effort, but they’re a small minority of entities.
This story is a good one for bringing ‘pharmeconomics’ into focus - some v intractable incentivisation problems in the industry, antibiotic development being the best known. Seems like it would be something that the great economic minds of our age should be able to get to grips with - it would mean they’d need to stop talking bollocks for 5 minutes, maybe leave the blog alone for a month or two, but it seems like a very clearly-defined problem.
Exactly. Even though the UK has publicly-funded healthcare, ‘loads of drugs’ have been invented there. The way some people in this country talk, if we go to a similar system, innovation will stop and we’ll have no new drugs.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that we’ll have no new drugs.
Lots of people are arguing that the rate of new drugs will decrease. And I think that’s reasonably well supported by the data.
The US accounts for 49% of the global pharma R&D budget. The UK accounts for 9%. Normalized for population size, that’s pretty close, though the US is spending about 10% more per person.
But if you look at where those companies make their money…
GSK is the biggest UK pharma company. In 2014, they earned more than twice as much revenue in the US than in Europe as a whole, and Europe has twice as many people living there.
So if the US started restricting drug prices the way that most European countries do, I think it’s safe to say that pharma revenue would drop significantly, which would lead to available R&D dropping as well.
Less R&D means fewer new drugs. Not none, certainly. Just fewer. And maybe that’s a tradeoff that we are willing to make for lower costs now. But it is a tradeoff.
Just because we haven’t yet found a working system that would eliminate the profit motive doesn’t change the fact that this is a symptom of a healthcare system that prioritizes profits. Even if you are right and the drug would not have been invented, that just means the for-profit motive had one good consequence and one bad consequence.
Though I would argue that it depends on what the profit motive was replaced with. Ideally, it would be replaced with actually caring about other people, but I can’t hold my breath on that.
The fact that this guy can’t be prosecuted for anything shows that our society is nowhere near ready for that. Well, that and pretty much everything else–up to and including a “mind your own business” mindset when seeing something bad happening.
Listen, I care about people. That’s why I decided to develop a drug in the first place. But, the hard truth is that I don’t have a few hundred million dollars laying around. So, I have to raise it from investors. I can’t raise 500 million dollars to get through the first few rounds of clinical trials unless there is some potential for profit on the other side.
Considering that only about 5% of early clinical phase drugs get approval and even have the possibility to make a profit, I’m essentially selling a 1/20 chance to make any profit at all. Nobody is going to take that chance on me for only the possibility of a small profit; high risk requires high reward. Remove the potential for high reward, and no one is going to take the risk.
I’d love to have a lab in my basement and develop a drug out of the goodness of my heart, but it is just absolutely not possible.
I guess you’re right. Without the profit motive and patenting of the medication, the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines wouldn’t have been developed and the country could have hundreds of thousands or millions of polio sufferers instead of a couple of guys having $7 billion from the patents.
The profit motive is not necessary to motivate researchers. There are plenty of people willing to spend their lives discovering cures as long as they make a half-decent living while doing so. There are, as we speak, tens of thousands of researchers working on disease-related academic research while being paid a pretty damn modest salary.
The profit motive, rather, is one (of several!) mechanisms to fund the research. Teams of researchers are expensive (even if they’re working for postdoc wages). Lab facilities, equipment, animals, and consumable reagents are expensive. Clinical trials, involving all the costs of the US healthcare system, are obscenely expensive.
Salk wouldn’t have been able to do the basic virology research, nor the vaccine development, merely using his free time and whatever is in Fiveyearlurker’s basement. He needed (and used!) a ton of funding. (I can’t find any precise figures, but I’d have to WAG that it would be tens or hundreds of millions after adjustment for inflation.) On a quick google, it looks like he got it from various public sources, including the government and non-profits.
The government continues to fund a substantial amount of basic research and early-stage applied research, but for the vast majority of approved drugs it’s been profit-driven pharmaceutical companies that have done all of the late-stage development and clinical trials.
The development of those vaccines was free? I’m going to need a citation for that. Also that was 70 years ago. Drug development has changed a smidge in the interim seven decades.
Listen. I’m a researcher, and I have a great idea that I’m willing to do for free*. Now what? I need hundreds of millions of dollars, that I don’t have, to develop it into a drug. Other than cooking meth, how do you propose I raise those funds? I need investors. I have to go to them and say, give me one hundred million dollars, and in ten years, I may have a drug. And, oh yeah, I’m going to give it away for free.
I’m not going to get that off the ground any time soon.
*(why should researchers, who have spent decades learning their craft, be the only people in the world who are expected to do things for no money? I didn’t go into this for money, but I’m not sure that I signed up for the priesthood either.)