Safety was never an issue anywhere. Anyone who insists on that is lying out their arse. The issue is money. You can get money in the US, but you can’t get much anywhere else. You let people import the drugs from the cheap zone, you lose money in the expensive zone, and your profits dry up. It’s very simple. It’s just drug companies can tell us, “Hey, American consumer, we’re forced to sell this drug for peanuts over there, but since your free markets let us charge you 'til it hurts we will! And we’d like to keep it that way!”
With the housing market people just found ways to pay. With health insurance people are finding ways to pay. I assume it’d be the same with pharmaceuticals.
As far as R&D it was $30.6 billion in the US in 2004. Not a small piece of change but again when you realize that 75% of the drugs are just pre-existing drugs or drugs we already have in one form or another it isn’t that great.
That website shows that R&D spending in the US was 4-5x as much as in places like Europe, but I have heard (don’t know how true it is) is the reason for that is just because US government research is better so a US based R&D company would fare better than an England based company.
Pretty much. The problem with the safety issue is not only that it is insulting (other developed countries are capable of it but we aren’t) but that it is too easy of a problem to fix to be the legitimate reason. Just have the FDA approve of a handful of overseas pharmacies and send in inspectors. It would be cheap and effective.
Well, it’s partly that, but the investment dollars are just so much greater here than elsewhere. It’s not like a smart Harvard professor can’t go start his own venture in Germany if he feels like it. It’s just, why would he want to?
Actually, I think if the industry moves anywhere, it’ll be China, Korea, India. Europe’s stagnant. Asia is booming. Lots of investment money is flowing there. So that’s where the business will be.
How do you figure we only pay a fraction of our healthcare costs? Do you know how big our paycheck would be if your employer didn’t provide insurance? Or, if your employer doesn’t provide insurance, what are you paying each month? We pay plenty, for everything. Not just drugs, everything. Everybody in American healthcare is cashing in with both fists on sick people, and the American consumer most certainly pays a great deal for a very lucrative market. Nowhere in the world do doctors and even nurses make as much as they do here. Nobody pays for drugs and medical supplies like we do. All that equipment, everything, we’re paying for it like no one else in the world. We’re wealthy, so we can mostly handle it, for now at least, but the idea we only pay a fraction for it is like saying we only pay a fraction of the cost when we total our car. We more than paid for it over the life of that car in insurance fees.
There was a bit of a hullabaloo last year when Dr. Peter Rost, Vice President of Marketing at Pfizer started saying that he believes drug importation is (or can be) perfectly safe:
Loopydude: I think Lorinada’s point is not that the costs aren’t paid for by all of us somehow but that they are largely externalized…which would tend to cause people to overuse the products and services (just like the fact that gas prices don’t reflect the environmental costs and the costs of invading Iraq causes us to be wasteful in our use of gasoline).
And, this is no doubt true to some extent, although I think it can be a bit exaggerated…e.g., I don’t think that people are going to rush out to get colonoscopies all because they can get one without paying very much for it.
Labor is dirt cheap too and countries like that will probably throw government money at the subject because they know their market will be developed first world countries so there could be a high profit margin. I think a PhD chemist in China earns about what a McDonalds employee in the US earns. At least that is the impression that I get from the Chinese PhD student I work with in the lab.
Canada controls the price of prescripiton drugs. If we export to the USA in any significant quantity, the drug companies will restrict sales to Canada. That will mean a shortage of drugs in Canada. To avoid this, the Canadian government will prevent significant drug exports to the USA. Quite simply, Canada will not put its presription drug supply at risk simply because the USA has failed to get its health care system in order.
According to our Federal Minister of Health: “The Government of Canada is committed to protecting Canada’s drug supply by strengthening its capacity to prohibit the export of Canadian drugs if and when necessary.” http://news.gc.ca/cfmx/view/en/index.jsp?articleid=157789
I think it undermines the position of the pharmacist. Pharmacists are expected to be professionals who offer a form of medical service to their customers by making sure they aren’t taking a lethal cocktail of drugs (and since most people go to multiple doctors but only one pharmacy/pharmacist a pharmacist has the best chance of catching this.) Pharmacists also tend to be the ones who will be the most likely to give information that their customers can use on any given drug.
I do think there are worries about completely irreputable types setting up “internet pharmacies” and selling pretty much whatever they want as prescription medication. While I think most informed people would never be taken in by this, a lot of older people trying to order prescription drugs on the internet could probably easily fall prey to this type of thing.
Down the road from where I grew up in Montreal are research and production plants for Merck, Pfizer, and a bunch of other drug companies. Biotech firms have research labs around the world, so the idea that the U.S. gov’t and/or public is funding all research is somewhat specious.
I just spent a week hanging around the Hep C conference in Montreal, and chatted with people who used to work for Big Pharma. They just left because in the past decade the marketing department has become the be-all and end-all of the company. The marketers dictate too much of the research (ie. we need another painkiller, we need a baldness treatment, etc…) and the scientists aren’t allowed to continue pursuing their own topics-- like figuring out how to improve animal testing so drugs wouldn’t be rejected at the human trial stage.
Knowing people who have worked on the marketing side, who were responsible for convincing doctors to prescribe their hot new drug, I can tell you they’ve got blank cheques for anything they want to do, like dinners, fine wine, box seats to a sports game. But a lab worker who wants to order some hundred-dollar tests? She’s got to jump through hoops justifying the expense.
That’s why Americans can’t import drugs from Canada-- it’d be cutting out the middleman who are a complete drain on society and convince your doctor to buy a new drug that costs more money and is less effective than a now-generic developed 30 years ago.
The pharmaceutical companies have already threatened Canada with cutting off their supply if they export to the US. Once they do that, Canada will take steps to cut off the export trade and the problem will move back down here.
Henh? I don’t work in a Big Pharma Co., admittedly, but I do know a couple people who do research for Novartis, and they certainly don’t have to beg to spend boatloads of money on experiments. A few hundred dollars is a piddling amount for lab supplies these days, so the idea you would have to jump through hoops to do work on that scale is, quite frankly, ludicrous. You’d never hit the ground, you’d be jumping so much. He and she are very smart folks, and the work they do is top notch. The story I keep hearing is, if anything, life is much easier and just as rewarding as it was for them in academia, largely because they don’t have to jump through all the usual hoops to chase grants. In that regard, their experience really isn’t any different than mine, they just do everything on a much bigger scale.
I don’t know who you were speaking to, but they sound like they’re full of shit, at least on the research side of things.
No shit at all loopydude. It sounds absolutely horrible, but these people jumped ship after at least 15 years with the same company because they, and just about every other Principal Investigator, had lost most of the control over their projects.
Trust me, I know how pathetic it sounds-- my wife is doing a post-doc, and could easily spend thousands a week without even trying-- but they thought that the industrial model of ‘no looking for grants’ has vanished from at least one Big Pharma firm.
