[miley_cyrus]

Not true: insulin is not a drug whose price is being negotiated here (https://www.jmcp.org/doi/full/10.18553/jmcp.2023.29.3.229). The drugs whose prices are being negotiated are the brand new ones, the ones that took billions of dollars to develop. Without the promise of a payoff, future R&D will be halted, and humanity won't get benefit from the new medicines.

[arp242]

Yet many other comparable countries pay substantially lower prices, and presumably the drug companies are still making a profit of that.

"If you don't pay us through the nose with billions we'll stop developing drugs" seems like a rather odd argument; disallowing the government from engaging in the free market on price in pretty much any area it would set of all sorts of corruption red flags. This is why all sorts of regulation around public procurements exist in almost any jurisdiction.

If you need money to develop new drugs: fine, this is why things like grants exist. Right now the drug companies want to have the best of all worlds with none of the obligations and downsides: inflated prices from Medicare are just tax subsidies but without any controls or checks or anything.

[willio58]

Exactly. It’s not like we’re saying people in medicine shouldn’t make good money. I’m glad doctors are paid well for example. What we don’t like is lack of price transparency and needlessly expensive medications. We allow drug companies to patent drugs, creating an inherent monopoly on that drug, then allow them to decide on an arbitrary price, usually a massive mark up over a reasonable profit margin. This has to stop and I love that there has been progress on this recently. But we need much much more

[owisd]

You’re assuming that the return pharma companies get is the absolute minimum they would be prepared to accept in order to do R&D, but I suspect there’s quite a lot of slack that the regulator could take in. The FCC fixed the price that AT&T could charge back in the monopoly days yet Bell Labs continued to churn out research for the benefit of humanity.

[hackeraccount]

Is there a diabetic in the house?

My understanding (and I don't have the time to look this up) is that insulin is complicated. It's not a single thing - and variations are currently being developed.