Let me simply quote Al Gore:
“They (pharmacuical companies) are price gouging and you are paying the bill, you need people to fight for your interests, not the big drug companies. There’s no other industry in America that has profits nearly as high as the big pharmaceutical companies*.”
What, the magical drug gremlins are just supposed to go around dropping of life saving new cures and medications to ill patients?
Is it just me, or does this country fail to percieve the importance of free markets in all products and services? How does a statement like this get so much support? Do people not realize that pharmacutical companies spend billions of dollars making new medications so that they can go through multi-million dollar drug testing programs for a product that ends up having legal protection from other drug companies for a mere five years or so? Do people realize that for every huge success like Viagra, Prozac, or Zocar there are five failures for drug companies? If people REALLY believe that being succesful in pharmacuticals merely requires only a willingness to kill people in costs, why do not more ruthless people enter the business? Has it not occured to them that we have six major drug companies in America with market caps over 100 billion competing with each other?
What the hell is wrong with these people?
*Does Gore have a cite on that claim? The top three drug companies have close to a 17% profit margin, hardly exceptional
Among the top ten profit margin performers traded publicly and with market caps above 25 billion, there is only one drug company on the list in tenth place, Eli Lilly
You’re getting into capitalist theory here, friend, and while I agree with you in theory, this does not happen in practice. You get things called collective pricing, where everyone agrees to charge 2 bucks for X product. If anyone goes below that price they get lynched. There is a law against it, but who can prove anything these days?
Free market means that a company can name its price and another may go below for commercial benefit. While this is certainly better, in my opinion, than government-controlled prices, in times of corruption and greed some things can be extremely, sometimes outlandishly, high-priced.
Collective price fixing has been in the news here in the UK recently. A car manufacturer – possibly Volvo, but I’d need to check – all but admitted that sales staff at all showrooms were encouraged to fix prices at an arbitrarily high level.
This was resolved by dealers importing machines directly rather than through the importers.
Court cases established that the manufacturers still had liability for maintainig warranties and safety recalls.
The courts also established that manufacturers were obliged to make sufficient product available to those who chose to buy from the parallel dealers which had been the biggest stumbling block as they had been illegally denied supplies.
The importers have been forced to lower their prices.
This is what finally started the ball rolling over car cartels and prices are falling steadily but surely.
So I assume here that the accusation here is price fixing and collusion? Interesting then that virtually every major pharmacutical company markets a product in direct competition with others in each of the following catagories: cardiovascular, anti-depressants, cholesterol, and home health care products. The accusation of collusion would also be contradicted by the fact that the cost for most drugs drops about 80% after the patents expire.
“So I assume here that the accusation here is price fixing and collusion? Interesting then that virtually every major pharmacutical company markets a product in direct competition with others in each of the following catagories: cardiovascular, anti-depressants, cholesterol, and home health care products. The accusation of collusion would also be contradicted by the fact that the cost for most drugs drops about 80% after the patents expire.”
Yes, but here’s the thing: do you know how much these products cost to make? a CD typically takes 5 cents to make, if that. CDs go on sale for twenty bucks.
After the patents expire, to my knowledge the stuff’s free market. Before then, whoever has the patent can sell it for any old price and you pay or you don’t get it.
To my knowledge, price-fixing is illegal in this country. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, and I’m not saying it’s the only thing that goes on, either. All I’m saying is that some people are not in the pharmeceutical market, for example, because they love helping people. If they did, the stuff would be free, IMO.
I don’t think that YOU know how much a product costs to make.
Even if you are pressing up a CD in extremely large quantities, you are at best going to spend $1.50 on a CD - which includes jewel case and artwork inside of it in addition to the disc itself.
Add on the other costs that go into the CD - promotion, record store and potentially the one-stop’s cut, promotional copies, MY SALARY, and a ton of other things all go into the cost of a CD, just as (to use a recent analogy) the price of gas is not only decided by whatever cost the Arabs are selling a barrell for these days.
Now, I still think CDs are overpriced. But saying they cost a nickel to make is flat-out WRONG.
algore’s tactic here is classic- spewing the same old tired liberal drivel: 1)Identify an ‘enemy’ (preferably a successful and/or wealthy one to achieve the desired goal of ‘class envy’) 2)gather the emotional sentiment of the sheeple.
It is the same politics of division that has been working so successfully for the left, but is wearing very thin lately.
Hmmmm…
Somehow it seems the recent tactics of the left in this country most closely resemble those of Hitler towards the Jews in Nazi Germany. As you may not know (probably as a result of being a product of the public education system), Hitler made the Jews the scapegoat for all Germany’s troubles. Just substitute “Christian” or “heterosexual” or “gunowner” or one of a myriad of other victims of the lefts hatred and you have the same thing.
The left learned well from the Third Reich (witness the Gun Control Act of 1968, word for word from the Weimar Republic prior to the Nazi takeover).
Al Gore is an idiot. Hell all he has to do is start his own drug company, and then he can come up with magic pills to cure AIDS and cancer, all for free. After inventing the internet for free that can’t be to hard. Then an old college budy can write a book about it.
Yeah, and then Sneev followed it up in grand Rush Limbaugh style.
'Scuse me, I have to goose-step down to a baby-killing Christ-mocking white-person-oppressing Independence Day party with all the other mincing, effeminate left-wingers. We’re gonna go up in the Black Helicopters and take all your handguns and power tools away…Bwaaaaaaa-ha-hah.
I think Satan was correct in his post, in that the same logic that says that CDs cost $.05 to make and sell for $20 is the same logic that people use when attacking the drug companies. You can’t set the price of something to the cost of actually producing it. Even if you accept that drug companies should be non-profit (which would be stupid), there are research and development costs, which are not at all insignificant. Then there’s all the testing, then there’s marketing, packaging, distribution, etc. Plus, I would imagine that the drug companies also do much to help educate doctors in the safe use of their products.
Then there’s the profits. Drug companies need to profit from their products in order to have suffiecient money on hand to continue to innovate new products, which often take years to develop.
I think Freaky’s references to German were saying that threemae and sneevil obviously have a strong belief in the capitalist system, and must be adherents to the Austrian School of economics. Yeah, that’s it. Because the notion that there was anything fascist about their posts is simply absurd.
I really worry when an actual cure for my diabetes seems so close now, and Gore says he’s (effectively) going to declare war on the big, heartless pharaceutical companies that are pouring millions of dollars into R&D for said cure research. From the campaign commercials I’ve seen running in my market, I’m almost seeing the start of another Hillaryesque demonizing of the Pharm companies - I really hope that’s not his intent.
Every day I hurt from my illness, and I would pay a lot to be whole again. A lot. At times in the past I wanted to kill myself because I suffered so much, but I am well past that now and into the stoic phase.
You’re putting words in my mouth. I never said that all Germans are Nazis. Of course, they are. But I never said they were.
Seriously, it’s a fuckin’ joke. And c’mon, slander?!
SLANDER!?!?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
::wiping tears from my eyes::
Well, you’ll have to forgive me if I’m less than sympathetic.
Sneevil sez:
Obviously you missed this the first time so I’m gonna say it real slow for you. She’s… making… fun… of… you. Ya mook.
And y’know what’s even more scary than the hate-monger on TV? All the little kiddies at home who wanna be just like him.
Water, Anthracite- Look, the thing is that these exorbitant prices aren’t because of research, it’s because of pointless ads and marketing.