That’s a separate issue. I’ve pointedly acknowledged drug companies spend an enormous amount on advertising. This is about what they spend on research. I know advertising expenditures are more than research expenditures. My OBVIOUS point is that they have more money to spend on both advertising AND research when their revenue is higher.
Are you seriously suggesting there’s no correlation between revenue and amount spent on research, that drug companies spend the same on research regardless of how much they take in revenue? That is the only way your argument makes sense. If that’s what you think I’m STILL waiting for some kind of citation to back that up.
With all due respect, what the hell does this have to do with anything? Okay, the Hadron Collider is really, really complex. This relates to the cost of drug development how?
Here is my position: Drugs are really expensive to create. The more revenue a drug company has, the more they have to spend on research to create more drugs. The U.S. pays the highest rates for drugs. As such, they offer the highest rate of financial return for drug companies. If the U.S. cuts the amount they spend on those drugs, drug companies will have less to spend on research.
I can’t simplify it any more than that. What could possibly be so hard to understand here?
So, what you’re saying is drug companies would develop more and better drugs if only they had less money?
Your gas price comparison makes no sense. You acknowledge the extra money goes to the government in the form of taxes. That’s not the case with drug manufacturers. The extra money goes into their coffers. Sure it means extra profits, extra admin costs, extra advertising, etc. But is also means extra for development.
OP, no arguments make sense but yours.
All analogies and comparisons are invalid.
And you’re frustrated that no ones seems to understand or support your position.
Read my post again. I’ve never said the higher price one guy pays subsidizes the lower price the other guy pays. What it subsidizes is the the car company’s ability to spend more on developing new cars. THAT helps him buy a better car at that lower price.
Yes, the U.S. market is financially more important to drug companies. Your own arguments about how much we overspend help prove that fact. If this gives you some unnecessary inferiority complex, so be it. Take satisfaction in knowing you spend a lot less on drugs than us which is something most of us envy.
Look above. Plenty of posters grasp the basic concept. But once the debate shifted from discussion of possible solutions into an Economics 101 lesson for those who don’t grasp the basic tenets of the discussion, they undoubtedly got bored, which is where I am.
The car company thrives on it’s profits whether you get a great deal, at the lot, or you get reamed. And, yes, R&D at any company, must be connected to profits, in the end. Using this obvious fact, as an argument for everyone else to be morally obligated to get reamed, along with you, is poor thinking and disingenuous in the extreme.
If you choose to believe that getting reamed, somehow equates to, ‘subsidizing’, the people who got better deals, (still got cars, still generated profit for car company and lot owner!), well, no one will be able to reason you out of a position you took entirely outside of ‘reason’. Only in your head do these things equate.
I’m having a hard time believing you’re really as dense, as you’re acting here.
There are many, many Canadians working in healthcare research, just as there are many, many citizens in every country working in healthcare research. Probably the biggest difference is that Canadians (and citizens of other countries with UHC) work in healthcare research without the shadow of losing healthcare insurance coverage hanging over their heads, so they do the jobs they want to do, where they want to do them. That kind of attitude in workers never stifles innovation.
Well said.
To be fair, I suspect that the biggest factor in stifling innovation in countries with UHC is bureaucracy (and no, we haven’t managed to eliminate that anywhere, as far as I know).
tbh, I don’t really understand the MRI example; the development came on the back of decades of work - initiated in the old USSR, the guy who developed the first imaging machine took out a patent, and the guys who applied it to medicine got joint Nobel’s (one each from the US and UK).
How on earth are you going to quantify a “US contribution” when there was no US public money involved and the whole development was so internationally intermingled over decades. It makes no sense to think of it as some discrete ‘national’ project and if it did, it wouldn’t be a success particularly for the ‘US’, whatever that is in this context.
In fact, there is no ‘national’ dimension to drug companies anyway - Board members, employees and shareholders are all entirely international (notable research skills and ownership of capital being that way).
You may as well argue the WWW is British because some bloke (okay, TBL) working at CERN needed a way to collate research.
No; I’m saying they may make more money if there were less overheads over the top. Like Shell might have more scope for increasing gasoline prices in the UK if the taxes on fuel were not so high.
Actually, no, most of the things I listed have nothing to do with drug manufacturers’ coffers e.g. insurance company profits. And of the things that do, they are costs – they are neutral to drug company profits.
If I have to increase the price of my product by $10 because my admin costs have gone up $10, does that mean I now make $10 more profit?
OP, you are committed to the idea that if drug companies make more profits they will produce more new, innovative drugs. Actually, they tend to produce more of what made money in the past.
This article contains a study on drug development and even quantifies this “innovation” you seek. Here’s a quote from the article:
*An average of 55·7 new chemical entities were developed each year, with an innovation index averaging 0·313 throughout the whole period (table 2). The innovation index is defined as the number of group 1 new chemical entities per total number of new chemical entities, where group 1 drugs have a substantial and important gain over existing therapies (eg, breakthrough drugs), and group 2 drugs offer little or no therapeutic gain (eg, “me-too” drugs). In other words, 68·7% (959 new chemical entities) of the 1393 registered products present little or no therapeutic gain compared with what was already available. *
All the major drug companies invested research dollars in developing their own version of Lipitor - the biggest selling drug in history. Really innovative, huh?
What research did Pfizer choose to pursue with the $125 billion or so in profits from Lipitor? Lipitor II. Which turned out to be a bust because it was killing people, so they wrote off about a billion dollars in research costs.
It would be better stated that ‘more innovation in drug creation for certain diseases and conditions is better than less’. Drug companies throwing their profits at boner meds is not going to make the world a better place.
Your arguments assume that drug companies will ultimately always be the ones to find the medicine that we need. But is their motivation the greater good of mankind, or is it quarterly profit and company stock price?
Right so. Which is why really important innovation often comes from universities and others with government grants, even though their budgets are much smaller.
Willfully obtuse? You’ve mischaracterized or misunderstood virtually every point I’ve made. You can keep saying “reamed” until the cows come home, but I’ve made NO suggestion that anybody is “morally obligated” to pay more for drugs. I have no idea how you infered that from what I wrote. Perhaps you keep altering my arguments so yours don’t sound so absurd. Strawman. I’ve also made it clear to you TWICE now that I’m not suggesting getting “reamed” (you sure love that word) subsidizes others getting good deals. Again, you have to characterize my words that way so your flimsy rationale doesn’t fall apart. Strawman.
None of this is to suggest that drug companies will always spend increased revenue wisely, or that they won’t also spend it on advertising, or that public sources won’t also contribute to research. But, if research is necessary for a company to remain competetive and research costs money, then more money will generally lead to more research. There is no amount of hair-splitting you can conjure that defeats this basic concept. The challenge for us will be to find new ways to compensate for that should U.S. price controls reduce the revenue of U.S. and international drug and equipment manufacturers.
If you can’t grasp the simple concept that more revenue equals more dollars for research, I can’t help you.
Here’s the part that just zipped right over your head: Who developed Lipitor in the first place? Pfizer, a for-profit corporation. Even the initial statin research in the early '70s was conducted by a doctor working for a private Japanese drug company.
I’ve noted several times that corporate research dollars are not always best spent or overly-focused on nominal improvements of existing drugs. But, less revenue won’t change that. Your own statistics suggest that 31.3% of new drugs are innovative. Are you suggesting that less revenue will cause that number to increase? Or will they put even more focus on variations of proven drugs that are a better hedge against falling revenue? If that happens, what can be done to mitigate any potential loss in research activity? Pretending that it’s a non-issue is just plain myopic.
Are you suggesting that the best way to mitigate potential loss of billions of dollars in revenue and corresponding research funds is for the corporations involved to reduce their overhead?
My arguments aren’t about who develops the new drugs and technology but who pays for it. The more other countries (admirably) reduce what they spend on such things, the more important America’s skyrocketing spending is to the companies that make the drugs and invent the machines. (And, no, I’m not suggesting all innovation comes from private companies.)
I’m sure there is a point you’re making here, but it’s really hard to see what it is.
Unless you consider Lipitor to be one of the great drug “innovations”. Which I don’t.
Lipitor is an enormously successful drug that has been shown to benefit very few people, while causing a host of negative side effects. Do we really need more of those?
No, and there’s no way in which you can claim that follows from what I said.
The overhead I’m talking about is the incredibly inefficient US healthcare system, and much of the money doesn’t go to the pharma companies. I’ve said this about 4 times now.
e.g. Money that the insurance companies make in profit isn’t going to pharma. Agreed?