what a simp, they have been "saving the world" since forever, it's how they make money. But sure we should give them credit for something we've already paid, now. Zero percent of that money is going into lobbying for their interests instead of the public's.
I spend $900 a month on an anti-seizure drug. At least, until I hit my $6,500 deductible.
The company that makes it is publicly traded so I looked up their financials. The drug is a generic and the patent expired decades ago. Very little is spent on “R&D”. Almost all of their money goes to “advertising”.
"Breaking news: thousands rejoice as greedy big pharma exec serves lengthy prison sentence."
"Now a word from our sponsor: Crapitab - ask your doctor for a reason to take it! (Warning: stop taking Crapitab immediately if you experience any of the following symptoms, including but not limited to: insomnia, rash, multiple organ failure, breathing cessation, prolonged unconsciousness, or death.)"
Don't worry. Congress is going to protect us, and stop all wrong doing. Just kidding. Congress is going to sell us out. Congress will create any and all corruption that the pharma industry want.
If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.
> if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.
If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and then you try to quadruple the price of what you're producing after you've already sold billions of units at a nice tidy profit, yes, that's greedy.
If pharmaceutical companies were free market entities who took all of the risk of developing new drugs, then it might be justifiable for them to charge whatever the market will bear. But that's not how drug research works in our society; in our society, we already pay for much of the research with our taxes, so pharma companies that are doing parts of the research and producing the drugs are not operating in a free market. They are benefiting from government largesse, and there are limitations that go along with that.
You're putting the word greedy in quotes, but what you're saying is exactly correct. People will pay anything to save their own life. If the market is allowed to react to that in an unrestricted manner, that quickly raises the wealth floor on being able to save your own life, which is, patently, morally incorrect in cases where the profit margin is high. It is antithetical to civilization. The fact that people who disagree with that high-level concept in the broad sense are not vanishingly rare is a desperate societal emergency.
Isn’t this the exact justification that Martin Shkreli used?
It’s not hypocritical; when your life literally depends on something, and they have a monopoly on the only thing that will save your life, it’s absolutely greedy to try and maximize profits.
When Apple overcharges for an iPhone, there are a few things that make this less evil:
1. There are lots of different smartphones out there that you have the option to buy instead. Even when I worked at Apple I found it surprisingly easy to get by on an Android for my first three months.
Yes it is.
It’s the “as much money as possible” part that makes it so.
It’s fine to charge cost plus some nice profit.
But trying to maximise the price in a medical context is morally equivalent to finding a person dying in the desert and making them sign all their assets over to you before giving them water.
What people also don't realize is that they only have the 20 year patent period to make money in. After that the drug is copied by generics companies. This incentivises innovation while also not placing a permanent burden on the economy.
Pharmaceuticals are 10-20% of healthcare spending and probably have a very good $/lives saved ratio. Isn't it great how you can just take cefalexin instead of having to get cut open and have an infection drained? 90% of all prescriptions in America are for generic drugs that cost almost nothing. It's easy to blame pharmaceutical companies because it is a somewhat concentrated industry but no one questions why their local urgent care physician is making $275,000 a year to basically Google symptoms and give out prescriptions.
Whether true or apocryphal, there exists this intriguing idea that in China's past, they had a system of medicine where doctors were paid a salary when the client was in good health, which immediately ceased if they fell ill.
What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and services that are working less and less.
Well, yeah? That is, essentially, the definition of greed: a "selfish and excessive desire for something".
I would say that excluding people from accessing life saving drugs, is definitely "greedy", even more so if the company has received a massive influx of cash from the government, like Moderna.
That is correct. If you are away from me then I don't care. If I'm falling to my death but you somehow managed to grab the rope and can stop my fall and pull me back up but instead you use this opportunity to demand as much money from me as possible then calling you "greedy" is literally mildest what anyone can call you.
They make money because patents prevent others from producing that “something”. The justification for patents is that the inventor gets to milk their invention in return for sharing how they did it. This is based on the an assumption that society as a whole benefits from this arrangement. So, if society as a whole is not benefiting from patents because pharma companies are charging obscene amounts then it is time to get rid of patents for medicines (or regulate how much pharma companies get to charge).
No way, a company that is greedy. I'm more amazed by how much restraint some companies have shown during the pandemic; they could've milked the public even more than they have.
I don't really get the outrage here. Barely anyone still needs the vaccine and there's at least one good alternative, so who are they hurting except for themselves because nobody will buy their vaccine now?
Now if Pfizer/BioNTech were to raise the price to a similar level, there would actually be somewhat of a problem (.. for the US government, since they still pay for it, right?).
Greed is a fundamental force of nature that gives life to the capitalism machine and our society. Money are the carrier particles of greed, they enable it to reach far. Corporations are the star-like centers of greed. Even though greed is poisonous, it's far better than fear that was the force behind master-slave societies of the past.
The next iteration of our society will run on pure ambition: the desire to be better, more knowledgeable or skillful, than others.
Even at 100x the price, the COVID vaccines have more consumer surplus than most things people buy.
I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers. I want founders and early employees in companies that innovate in these spaces to be fabulously wealthy. I want ambitious young people to dream of becoming a billionaire by curing cancer rather thank making a social media app.
I agree in part and disagree in part. I want there to be a financial incentive to improve the lives of humanity via medical advances, whether that’s pharmaceutical, surgical, assistive devices, etc.
I also want to leave money for the rest of the economy, so that doesn’t really leave room for $5200/year/person for 2 COVID shots. (That’s about 7.5% of GDP just for COVID shots if every American gets 2 such shots per year, which is pretty obviously untenable.)
Didn't really cure anything tho I'f they price treatment out of reach of the masses. It'd just be better seeing rules in place so billionaires don't exist. The concept one individual can have so much is absurd. Basically a sign of a failing society to allow such polarization between wages at the top and the bottom.
That's not what happens in Big Pharma. In anything but covid their huge money makers are marketing, lobbying and bribery. Medical innovation lies somewhere at the bitter end.
Successful covid vaccines didn't come from Big Pharma. Moderna and Novartis were not that.
> I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers. I want founders and early employees in companies that innovate in these spaces to be fabulously wealthy.
Sure, in an utopian world that would work. But, here on planet Earth, that would massively increase the incentives of fraud. There are already huge issues with this. Increasing the payout by x100 would do more harm than good in this context.
Big Pharma also pays billions in taxes to fund agencies like the NIH. While there are certainly a lot of shenanigans with intellectual property rights and market exclusivity at the end of the day we do get extreme value from pharmaceutical companies. If there was more competition, we would not see price hikes as often as we do.
People pretend like competition is some magic thing that could crop up, and not a thing that requires constant regulation to prevent companies from engaging in anti-competitive behavior. Every company is incentivized to engage in anti-competitive behavior. If you want more competition, they need to be strictly regulated.
wallscratch|3 years ago
nsonha|3 years ago
atonse|3 years ago
They made $18bn in profit. And the founder is with $6bn.
That’s plenty of credit.
lakomen|3 years ago
temptemptemp111|3 years ago
[deleted]
nullish_signal|3 years ago
nosianu|3 years ago
> 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds
> Ads often tout new, pricey drugs that are not much better than old, cheaper ones.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/most-prescription-dr...
Also:
> The US is one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials. (The other is New Zealand.)
TrueGeek|3 years ago
The company that makes it is publicly traded so I looked up their financials. The drug is a generic and the patent expired decades ago. Very little is spent on “R&D”. Almost all of their money goes to “advertising”.
musicale|3 years ago
"Now a word from our sponsor: Crapitab - ask your doctor for a reason to take it! (Warning: stop taking Crapitab immediately if you experience any of the following symptoms, including but not limited to: insomnia, rash, multiple organ failure, breathing cessation, prolonged unconsciousness, or death.)"
seaourfreed|3 years ago
amadeuspagel|3 years ago
pdonis|3 years ago
If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and then you try to quadruple the price of what you're producing after you've already sold billions of units at a nice tidy profit, yes, that's greedy.
If pharmaceutical companies were free market entities who took all of the risk of developing new drugs, then it might be justifiable for them to charge whatever the market will bear. But that's not how drug research works in our society; in our society, we already pay for much of the research with our taxes, so pharma companies that are doing parts of the research and producing the drugs are not operating in a free market. They are benefiting from government largesse, and there are limitations that go along with that.
happytoexplain|3 years ago
tombert|3 years ago
It’s not hypocritical; when your life literally depends on something, and they have a monopoly on the only thing that will save your life, it’s absolutely greedy to try and maximize profits.
When Apple overcharges for an iPhone, there are a few things that make this less evil:
1. There are lots of different smartphones out there that you have the option to buy instead. Even when I worked at Apple I found it surprisingly easy to get by on an Android for my first three months.
2. I don’t die when I don’t have an iPhone.
Swenrekcah|3 years ago
It’s fine to charge cost plus some nice profit.
But trying to maximise the price in a medical context is morally equivalent to finding a person dying in the desert and making them sign all their assets over to you before giving them water.
from|3 years ago
detrites|3 years ago
What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and services that are working less and less.
manuelabeledo|3 years ago
I would say that excluding people from accessing life saving drugs, is definitely "greedy", even more so if the company has received a massive influx of cash from the government, like Moderna.
thomassmith65|3 years ago
scotty79|3 years ago
guerrilla|3 years ago
sanp|3 years ago
harimau777|3 years ago
bobkazamakis|3 years ago
ur-whale|3 years ago
solarkraft|3 years ago
I don't really get the outrage here. Barely anyone still needs the vaccine and there's at least one good alternative, so who are they hurting except for themselves because nobody will buy their vaccine now?
Now if Pfizer/BioNTech were to raise the price to a similar level, there would actually be somewhat of a problem (.. for the US government, since they still pay for it, right?).
akomtu|3 years ago
The next iteration of our society will run on pure ambition: the desire to be better, more knowledgeable or skillful, than others.
based_karen|3 years ago
[deleted]
pandeiro|3 years ago
[deleted]
RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago
I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers. I want founders and early employees in companies that innovate in these spaces to be fabulously wealthy. I want ambitious young people to dream of becoming a billionaire by curing cancer rather thank making a social media app.
sokoloff|3 years ago
I also want to leave money for the rest of the economy, so that doesn’t really leave room for $5200/year/person for 2 COVID shots. (That’s about 7.5% of GDP just for COVID shots if every American gets 2 such shots per year, which is pretty obviously untenable.)
gtvwill|3 years ago
hourago|3 years ago
I want citizens to not die of treatable diseases. Our goals seem to be different.
scotty79|3 years ago
Successful covid vaccines didn't come from Big Pharma. Moderna and Novartis were not that.
bloodyplonker22|3 years ago
sfusato|3 years ago
Sure, in an utopian world that would work. But, here on planet Earth, that would massively increase the incentives of fraud. There are already huge issues with this. Increasing the payout by x100 would do more harm than good in this context.
pg_bot|3 years ago
xracy|3 years ago