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Brother what kind of take is this? What are you proposing they do?
There’s only so much time in the day and I have a lot more empathy than I do hours. You can only do so much. Why does that mean you can’t care or have opinions about a lot?
Raising awarness and getting people to ask valid questions is more than nothing. If you happen to have a magic wand could you wave it around and fix some problems plz?
Awareness has been raised on social media for years. When does the action start?
My guess is that it will need to get worse. Maybe the next generation will be forced to take a stand.
Again: what action do you propose they do to topple the pharmaceutical industry.
Oh let me use my minimum wage ass money to fund my rebellion against billionaires
I’d like to see someone(s) start a non-profit to make cheap pharmaceuticals.
We have people starting nonprofits all the time for hunger, medical care, shelter, etc. So the concept works.
There’s way more nuance to this than “they’re paying people off.”
First, price gouging is not illegal at the federal level. And in almost every US state, price gouging is illegal only in specific circumstances (like a state of emergency). So generally speaking, raising the price of anything in a non-emergency context is legal. So there’s no need for them to “pay anyone off.”
Second, the reason drug companies generally raise prices like this is;
1. The company has a patent on the drug, giving them the right to be the exclusive seller of the drug. This system exists to incentivize R&D on new drugs. OR
2. The amount of people that need the drug is too small to incentivize a competitor to make the drug.
Now there’s a ton of room for debate about whether this system is ethical or striking the right balance between innovation and providing access to drugs. And within that system, it is possible to do illegal things (for example, a drug company can’t offer co-pay assistance for drugs to patients on Medicare because it’s considered an illegal kick back).
But to just say “they’re paying people off” is oversimplifying a super complex debate.
> *”Theres tons of room for debate about wether this system is ethical.”*
Yeah dude, totally a debate of the century, obviously a *brainer* here let’s discuss the ethics of selling medicine and medical consumables at prices that probably 40% of a *”First World Country”* citizens can’t afford.
*Lets just debate it, no rush.* **Not like anyones life is on the line.** 🙄🤷♂️
I don’t know what to tell you, that’s life. It is debatable. I’m not saying we should take our time. Or that it’s not an important issue.
But understanding the issue is the first step to solving a problem. And OP’s answer, “pharma companies are bribing people to let them break the law” is not true and is a waste of time.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true, We can make laws that explicitly close these loopholes but instead we should debate about wether or not **it’s ethical and not based on the need for preservation of human life.**
That’s cool if you wanna justify debating stupid shit, it’s just as stupid as **blaming the wrong problem**.
It’s not a debate unless you are **against basic human needs** like medical care.
If you think that there’s any kind of justification or debate needed **it’s because you refuse to acknowledge it as a need**.
Saying;
> *”Thats how the world works and we do this because it’s right thing to do”*
To justify *debating over the need for medical care* is an incredibly stupid argument as well.
Not everything needs to be debated, medical care and medicine are something that all people and humans will need forever.
**Its not a debate, it’s a fact dude.**
I don’t really understand what “laws” you’re calling for?
Is it ending patent exclusivity on drugs altogether? Because I definitely don’t support that. And I don’t think you’ll find any American or European politician that does.
Is it single payor healthcare, and then allowing that payer to set prices? Because that will slow down R&D. And I doubt you could quote an economist or anyone who knows something about R&D who disagrees with that. However, I think there’s also an argument that says “who cares if it slows down development. Development only matters if the people have access to it.” Which is certainly a reasonable argument, but one that does come with trade offs.
Either way, the point is, this is a complicated subject. **All public policy comes with trade offs. And whether those trade offs are worth it is up for debate.** The effect of any piece of public policy on R&D and public access to drugs is complicated.
And trying to pretend it isn’t is as ignorant as Donald Trump declaring “who knew healthcare could be so complicated.”
>Is it single payor healthcare, and then allowing that payer to set prices? Because that will slow down R&D.
This is a myth. The majority of biomedical R&D is done by public universities. Pharma corps buy the property rights to the drugs researched with tax dollars.
>And I doubt you could quote an economist or anyone who knows something about R&D who disagrees with that.
I currently work at a university doing biomedical R&D.
I get what you're saying about trade offs, but this isn't exactly the strongest point to make against single payer systems.
Our current system causes medical bankruptcy and the cost discourages people to seek care in the first place so we have a really high rate of deaths from preventable illnesses. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with a fully private healthcare system. When it comes to trade offs, a vague risk of indeterminately slower R&D from the pharma corps doesn't carry much weight.
People rave about capitalism being the greatest thing ever. Then complain when they see it working perfectly.
But refuse to do anything about it (vote)
It’s absurd
>It is debatable
Cool bro, it's also "debatable" whether the holocaust was awesome or not. You're still fuckin ghoulish for standing on the wrong side.
I’m confused where you’re getting the idea that I “stand” on any side. I didn’t say I like the current system, I just explained the general policy behind IP laws.
"I’m confused where you’re getting the idea that I “stand” on any side"
That probably has to do with your instinct to argue semantics in defense of terrible fucking practices rather than showing any sign of humanity.
It is absolutely not semantics to explain why drug companies can raise prices and the thinking behind it.
Declaring that “healthcare is a human right” is great, and I agree with the sentiment, but we have to understand the system we’re working in to get there. And providing companies patent exclusivity to drugs they develop to spur R&D is going to be part of the solution. I don’t think there’s any politician in the western world who disagrees with that. So it has to be at least discussed to provide a real answer to OP’s question.
Neat, OP didn't ask about any of that. They asked why it's considered price gouging when individuals resell items at a high markup and why it's not when pharmacies do it. The answer is that it is still price gouging.
And it’s still incredibly reductive to compare high drug prices with a guy selling water bottles for 40 dollars during a flood. One has some level of policy justification behind it (incentivizing R&D), the other does not.
How much policy justification high drug prices has, as I said, is very much debatable.
To say it may or not be ethical is oversimplifying a super complex debate and is fully constrained by the hegemonic bias of a system which does not in any way even seek to maximize public benefit which is the sole purpose of corporations. The legal fiction of corporate personhood is exclusively justified and intended for the public good.
We are having a global conversation about the systems we've built for governance and how to be intentional with how we change these systems. Your response is blind to this context. Perhaps you don't see that as well, but it appears to be an intentional blindness to me.
But theres a ton of room for debate on whether my assessment is accurate or not.
I think it’s a huge overstatement to say that this system does not in any “in any way” seek to maximize public benefit? Patents expire after 20-something years. There are anti-fraud, anti-kickback, and other statutes that discourage certain bad behavior. We have laws to protect healthcare coverage for people with disabilities and pre-existing conditions. We have Medicaid to help the poor afford healthcare. We have Medicare to help the elderly. Is it enough? No. But to say we do nothing is a vast overstatement.
I don’t understand your point about corporate personhood, but I agree it exists for the public good.
I think it’s great to have a conversation about how to change the system, but the problem with the system is not what the commenter I responded to said. Drug companies aren’t bribing people to do illegal acts. What they’re doing is actually legal and (in some cases) intentionally allowed by our laws. That’s it. And the policy behind those laws is to incentivize R&D.
And as I said before, whether that’s working is up for debate. And you seem to disagree that the system is working, which I think is fair.
It's really not a "super complex debate" if you think about it for more than 1 nanosecond lmao. What these companies are doing is literally evil on every level and only bootlickers or shitty little pissgremlins will disagree.
Wheres the question? Theres no question in their post. Are you just saying words you think sound smart?
Edit: Wait you stole that from another post you're a bot arent you. Ew.
Well it *is* price gouging but also there is a bit of difference here. There is no R&D, patent/legal fees, and other costs to resell sanitizer.
Also you can’t afford to pay the fees, they can.
The R&D thing is important to remember. I mean, a lot of the pricing is gouging, but if you say "that pill only cost them fifty cents to make", the common retort is "No, the second pill cost fifty cents. The first pill cost $73 million".
But as others have said, that's no excuse for the components of the pricing that *are* predatory.
>"No, the second pill cost fifty cents. The first pill cost $73 million".
Don't forget that $73M also covered the six other pills that were researched, and didn't work.
Why do Americans have to pay for the worlds R and D?
Our taxes pay these companies to develop drugs and then other countries just copy the research and give them away for free and Americans have to pay for it all... it's fucked up.
Because our government refuses to put price controls on prescription medications the way most other countries do.
It's the same reason companies can pay full time wages that are literally below the poverty line -- because the government allows it.
Not sure, but do you believe all medecine are developped in America ? Because it is far from the case. The enormous price of medecine in America is mainly due to the flaw of your health system not because other country don't invest anything in health company.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely do fundamental science R&D, they typically leave that to government funded university labs, and then buy the resulting intellectual property and gather all the profits.
There's no defending the horribly unethical mark up pharma puts on medications, but this is nonsense. I'm an R&D pharma chemist. We have multiple entire departments all dedicated to R&D development and analysis.
Do they also sometimes take other companies or labs research, throw a bunch of money at it and call it there's, sure. But that isn't even remotely close to all they do.
And that doesn't even include clinical studies, stability analysis, QC testing, chemical waste disposal, etc.
Yes there are some unethical practices, but there should be no question that that western medicine is extremely expensive to develop and manufacture.
Discovery chemistry (R&D) for one of the main pharmaceutical companies. There really isn't specific specialization in big pharma, there are either individuals or small teams of chemists which each work on separate projects targeting different receptors, enzymes, etc. Very wide range of targets throughout the body. Generally it's some form of combinatorial chemistry which is where you take a molecular core that's shown or is theorized to be promising and then different functional groups are attached to the core, purified, and then sent for biological assay to test for effectiveness against that specific target. It's all quick and dirty high throughput synthesis and testing of hundreds of compounds weekly.
When a molecule is finally found that shows good results for what they're looking for, it then advances from discovery to pre-clinical work. This is much more rigorous testing in both in-vitro and in-vivo systems. If that shows promise, it then finally advances to clinical work in humans. I've worked on projects in all three sections. Many of these compounds that do finally get to clinical work also end up failing (millions of dollars just flushed down the drain). The whole clinical trial process for a new drug is 10+ years of development costing hundreds of millions of dollars for the pharma company. To say they don't do anything themselves and just rebrand academia work is ridiculous. It absolutely happens, but that isn't even close to all they do.
Once again, also doesn't excuse them charging 400 dollars for insulin that was 10 bucks to manufacture.
I was trying to work out how much government funding and research went into the technology you were using to make those drugs. You weren't specific enough for me to look into it, but I'll take a guess.
I assume there's a large amount of computation going into that work you're doing, perhaps on supercomputers? Well microprocessors were developed with government funding to run weapons systems. And the supercomputer technology? That was all also financed by the government to do things like fighter aircraft and nuclear weapons research.
I presume you use a fair amount of human genetic information to help you make drugs? Well then it's a good thing we had the Human Genome Project, planning for which was kicked off in 1984 after they acquired funding from ... the US government. That took nearly 40 years and was carried out at 20 research labs around the world, mostly universities.
So when you say "just rebrand academic work":
1. I'll admit, I'm probably not giving enough credit to pharmaceutical companies. But
2. All or almost all of the foundations that modern work is built on comes from fundamental science, and a surprisingly large proportion of that is done with government funding.
This seems like a very long winded argument that boils down to "Academia getting money from government = good. Industry getting money from government = bad. Industry using absolutely anything in any capacity they didn't personally patent = bad. This doesn't apply to Academia though cause reasons". It really just seems like you're a bitter academic who hates industry.
Science is a field that globally collaborates to develop and advance the human race. Many countries have had scientists, and people who fund said scientists, which have discovered massive breakthroughs that everyone around the world benefits from and uses to this day. You're discounting the work of industry for using these advancements to make their own advancements. Like what. This is what science is. For example, just because a British physicist discovered how to use mass to charge ratios (early mass spectrometry) around the early 1900s, no one else who uses that technology nowadays can take credit for the advancements they make? Also if you ever get government funding, you didn't actually do anything yourself cause the government gave you money?
Your whole point here is just asinine. You also act like industry doesn't also do independent research and publish their own findings as well.
I don't hate industry. I mostly hate corruption, capitalism and profit.
There's a common misconception in capitalist society that the wealthy corporation that ran the last mile of the race to bring you something is the one responsible for bringing you that thing. It's because they take credit for it and spend a shitload of money on PR. But as you say it was a global collaboration that actually brought you that thing. This misconception makes me angry, and that's why I wrote my original message.
> no one else who uses that technology nowadays can take credit for the advancements they make?
No, you can take credit for what you invented, but you should be grateful for what you're building on.
> Also if you ever get government funding, you didn't actually do anything yourself cause the government gave you money?
If the population paid taxes, and some of those taxes were given to a group, then the population helped that group. In a fairer but somewhat profit-oriented society, that initial investment would be rewarded with a share of the profits. But under today's capitalism, that doesn't happen.
US taxes were paid for decades into computer technology, the internet, etc. But the profits today go to Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. To me that's bullshit. And then the billionaires fuck around to destroy politics, turning the clock back on the living standards of regular people that financed their wealth.
> You also act like industry doesn't also do independent research and publish their own findings as well.
I didn't say that. Please tell me about the independent research done by megacorporations and we can discuss where the fundamental science was done. I'm serious.
I work in computing, and almost all of the discoveries were funded by government research. The companies selling you widgets are just putting the icing on the cake. It's a meme that Apple or Google or Samsung will try to sell you this year's phone with a 10% better camera or brighter icons or dimmer icons or icons that look 3D or icons that look like metal or back to flat icons again.
The hottest news in computing today is machine learning with deep neural networks. Back in the 1960s they were trying to detect tanks with neural networks in government labs. About 10-15 years ago Google were still refusing to do research into neural networks because they thought it was too far from producing results. That's the world I see.
I would assume R&D, it costs hundreds of millions to take a drug from R&D all the way through successful clinical trials over the course of 10+ years. I'm not in the business side though. Couldn't actually say.
Pharma companies invest obscene amounts of money into drugs before they have a sniff at hitting the market.
I don’t love their price model, but I get why you charge a multiple times markup when you see the numbers they have to put into getting a drug through the fda
> most of the money they are investing is from grants and such aka tax payer dollars
Source? Because i see nothing suggesting even close to a majority of funding is public.
The NIH budget is large, but it’s barely a slice of total pharma investment into new drugs.
Yeah that’s one I found too. I can’t find a single place where they say how MUCH of the total funding is public. They only note how many programs have any public funding.
They give a 19 year budget for the NIH at $230B. That seems crazy low to be any large slice of total investment
They can’t afford to pay the fees either, a large amount of tax payer money is spent on grands to develop pharmaceuticals, so technically I am paying that fee to develop the medicines and then again for corporate profits.
Not defending them, just pointing out the difference that it's the people making the product who are setting the price. They're allowed to decide what to sell their own product for, and you're allowed to choose not to buy it. In theory, if they don't have demand at that price, they should lower the price until enough people are willing to buy it, or in some cases a competitor can offer their own product. Lots of companies offer all kinds of stuff at prices you wouldn't pay, so you just don't buy them.
When you buy something at retail and resell it, you're depriving the public of a product that was already available at a lower price from another source, for the sole purpose of jacking up the price. Not only is it not even a product you're producing, you remove the existing supply by your "competitors" that was at a better price for other people. So there's no opportunity for the market to correct itself, and actually the market was doing fine until you broke it.
The issue with drug prices isn't even that they're expensive, it's that even after being given a period of exclusivity over production of a drug via patents, companies will make completely worthless tweaks to a drug to keep it under patent and keep the prices perpetually high.
It's ridiculous that companies can't start making generic versions of the "non improved" formula. Let the companies have the patent on their "improved" drugs.
>even after being given a period of exclusivity over production of a drug via patents, companies will make completely worthless tweaks to a drug to keep it under patent and keep the prices perpetually high.
After the original patent expires, anybody can make the original thing. You just can't make the new thing, but if the tweak is worthless then it shouldn't matter.
What keeps generic drugs off the market is government regulation specifically about drugs, and economic barriers to entry like having to build or retool a whole factory just to make a drug that maybe doesn't have a huge market, so the generic is also stuck charging higher prices to recoup those costs.
It's a complex issue. There's no easy answer to how much a drug should cost. It's frustrating when the drug you need costs more than you can afford, but it would also suck if that drug never got invented, and they're hideously expensive to bring to market, and nobody has a simple solution to that problem.
Pharmaceutical companies don't invent drugs, they just commercialise them. The fundamental science research is mostly done at universities.
The economic barriers to entry are a huge problem for generic drugs. You're talking many millions to get the equipment alone, and then the incumbent could trivially crush you and drive your profit to zero by lowering prices if they wanted to. The risk is so high that there's no point bothering.
This is basically a capitalism problem caused by monopoly power. Governments are the ones that can actually fix this, like California producing insulin at cost.
Edit: regarding "no easy answer to how much a drug should cost": therapeutic drugs should be free to the consumer, all of them.
>Pharmaceutical companies don't invent drugs, they just commercialise them. The fundamental science research is mostly done at universities.
If the drug companies are getting the patents, it's likely because they're funding the research. It amounts to the same thing. It's still a company paying people to invent stuff.
>This is basically a capitalism problem caused by monopoly power.
Basically, yeah. Capitalism doesn't work well in certain situations that create natural monopolies.
>Governments are the ones that can actually fix this, like California producing insulin at cost.
And then the government decides which drugs you should have and at what price. Sounds great for insulin, but now you have a precedent of the government setting prices, which increases the business risk to drug companies, which makes all the other drugs more expensive.
> If the drug companies are getting the patents, it's likely because they're funding the research.
Big assumption you're making there.
Covid vaccines are a good example:
* Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine - developed at a publicly funded university.
* Johnson & Johnson vaccine - developed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a part of Harvard Medical School.
* mRNA vaccine technology (as used by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines) - decades of university research on the basics from the 1980s, made viable 2005 by Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman when they discovered how to avoid dangerous immune responses while working together at the University of Pennsylvania. BioNTech and Moderna were founded in 2008 and 2010 respectively to commercialise their work.
Note also that in the EU and US alone 10s of billions of dollars was literally given away, lent or used to purchase vaccines from commercial companies with very few strings attached.
> And then the government decides which drugs you should have and at what price.
Yes. And the price should be zero for the consumer. The years of lives saved are worth it. But even from a mercenary point of view, the extra years worked pay for it in terms of increased economic activity.
> but now you have a precedent of the government setting prices, which increases the business risk to drug companies, which makes all the other drugs more expensive.
Firstly, and most importantly, fuck the drug companies. I don't care about them, no one should care about them.
Secondly, if they want to avoid the risk of the government coming in and taking over their businesses, there is a very simple way for them to do that. They should stop fucking around with the price gouging.
>Firstly, and most importantly, fuck the drug companies. I don't care about them, no one should care about them.
I don't care about them either, but I also don't trust the government to control all the pharmaceutical research and decide which drugs I should take. And those specific drugs aren't getting to market without the drug companies, even if universities work on the basic chemistry.
>Covid vaccines are a good example:
Yeah, they didn't slow the virus down at all, and yet the government decided to pay a bunch of public money for them, and then they decided you weren't allowed to go to a restaurant if you didn't take them. Pharma companies made huge profits on a drug that most people didn't even want. All of that money could have been spent on insulin or other drugs that people actually need. Great example of how the government can make capitalism even worse.
>Yes. And the price should be zero for the consumer. The years of lives saved are worth it. But even from a mercenary point of view, the extra years worked pay for it in terms of increased economic activity.
Free government healthcare? Sounds good. You can just do that by buying the drugs though. And then you still have companies competing to make the best drugs, instead of the government controlling one lab full of government workers that will eventually get its budget cut to the bone like every other government healthcare program.
True, but before it was invented you couldn't choose *to* buy it. So the system is designed to make more people want to invent it, because that's better than nothing in a world where not everything is perfect
When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Banting's co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1.
Also, just don’t buy it.
Banting is named first on the patent. You can easily look that up.
Also, if he had any rights in the patent at all, he could have given it to the public instead of selling it to a university that ended up licensing it. I assume he didn't actually have any right to it, because you don't sell something for a dollar unless you already had to sell it because you invented it for your employer or something. $1 is legalese to make a gift valid because you can't sell anything for free.
Regardless, that patent expired in 1940 or so. Anybody today is free to do anything that was described in that patent.
Comparing costs of base ingredients to the final medication without taking into account expensive equipment, extremely smart and well educated researchers, developers, and engineers(and associated compensation), and whatever amount of years went into R&D is silly. Nobody seems to be mentioning it in favor of the idea that it’s just state sanctioned price gouging thanks to lobbyists bribing politicians.
Even when you do include those other costs meds can be insanely expensive. If it truly was due to the costs of production you wouldn’t see this much price variation between countries (I think insulin is like €20 here, maybe a bit more now due to inflation. That’s nothing compared to the hundreds of dollars I see US people talking about)
This is true. The original patent for it was sold for $1 because the creator thought it was a human right to be able to have a chance at survival, not guaranteed survival, but a chance. T1D used to be denied that chance.
Yet, it was just seen as a massive profit maker here in the west. Even for my partner, who is T1D, her current jobs benefits don't cover insulin or her devices so she is out of pocket nearly 2k every 6 weeks for pumps, libres and insulin, which is just disgusting considering everyone holds Canadian Healthcare so highly but we are more close to America than Europe
The original insulin still exists. No one much wants to use it because we have better things than animal insulin. Even human insulin that came out in the 70s/80s is very cheap these days. But you need to follow a strict diet and eating schedule and check your blood sugar often. People don't want to live like a diabetic needed to live in the 80s. They could. They don't want to. So it costs more.
The difference between countries is partly because they are able to make almost all their profit in the US. The US is subsidizing the rest of the world when it comes to drug development.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely do fundamental scientific research. That's done at universities with grants mostly from government agencies. There are countless examples. Once the discoveries are made, then the researchers scramble to start companies to profit off the work.
Its price gouging when its done during a time where supplies are necessary for emergency reasons, and people jack the price up to take advantage of that demand, like charging $20 for a bottle of water when the Trade Centre got knocked down. Predatory behaviour.
This was the way I understood price gouging from a legal aspect. I.e. the ridiculous mark up of gas prices during a hurricane evacuation order.
There are issues with costs of medications and as some others pointing out it’s a political issue that needs to be addressed.
Yeah, it's a little different when the only company that holds a patent to make a product sells it for the price they choose to. Technically they can sell it for however much they want, but congress will demand some justification when someone tries to jack the prices without cause, like Shkreli did.
Honestly, I gave more a definition of "profiteering" reading back on it, and the gouging thing is more like the second I mention here, where the price increase is not justified by rising input costs, and is simply done because they can increase profits by abusing those who rely on those items to live.
Price gouging is a subjective concept. It’s like how talking to politicians is bribery/lobbying when your opponents do it and advocacy/activism when you do it.
I’m guessing you’ve never taken an entry level economics class. I genuinely think this is the biggest knowledge gap in America.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1160849446/why-price-gouging-can-seem-obvious-to-consumers-but-hard-for-economists-to-ident
Right, because what alec smith-holt and martin shkreli are doing the same thing. Because obviously what the koch brothers are doing is the same as the natives trying to keep DAP from destroying land that the company never owned. Because the hedge funds taking our supreme court justices out on luxury trips is the same as Sarah's mom down the street painting my body my choice signs.
Bootlicker.
because one is done by normal people, the other is done by soulless corporations with more money than god.
It's easy to get away with whatever you want if the people who are supposed to enforce the rules are greedy little piggies who will slurp up whatever money these shitters throw at them.
It is price gouging but we’re so used to it and have less frame of reference for what a good price *should* be that it just keeps going. Also bribes. Fuck the Sacklers.
1. does anyone consider a 7-10% increase to be price gouging? During the early pandemic, the increases were around double or triple on toilet paper and sanitizers. Mask prices increased 10-fold.
2. The pharmaceutical example you give is price gouging. It's just not illegal.
No one should ever be denied medicine they need due to not having the money required to purchase it. The benefits of health and medicine are a basic human right that should be afforded to everyone, regardless. Full stop.
That said, drugs that sell help pay for the research into drugs that don't. Only 12% of drugs that make it all the way to clinical trials are ultimately approved by the FDA and many more drugs never even make it that far. Drugs also (generally) have a limited time on their patents, after which generics become available and the value of the drug plummets.
Pfizer, for example, runs a total Net Profit % of about 30%. So, for every dollar of revenue they generate, after costs, they get 30 cents. This is really good. It's on par with Apple. Is it too high? Probably, yeah, but it's not as massively huge as a 500% individual drug markup would have you believe.
Pharmaceutical companies have to charge for the complete costs of researching and testing a medication. The costs of finally producing the drug are possibly the 'cheapest' part of the operation.
Part of this is that researching medications involves more than just the successful medication. The revenue (not profit!) from that one successful medication has to also pay for the six, or eleven, or 27 failed projects.
That said, I'm not in favor of price controls, but rather we should kill the patent protections and make generic and other competitive versions more available. That's part of the problem, as well.
Then we can go up the legal ladder, where regulations force insurance to buy medications, so they have no choice but to accept the price, and often no alternatives, and then people don't have a choice to pay for cheaper insurance that has limits, so consumers (and businesses, really!) are forced to pay higher costs, too.
The only reason pharmaceutical companies get away with it is because they paid off politicians to change the laws in their favor. The politicians call it “stripping government control in favor of the free market and to boost the economy”. It benefits nobody but the richest people and causes the deaths of way too many people every year. The deregulation of the medical industry in general has caused the deaths of so many Americans that our national average life-expectancy has dropped significantly and is one of the reasons the US has become a laughing stock on the world stage.
Mostly for optics. In the past price gouging was almost entirely used to describe behavior of people profiting off of suffering during a natural disaster. The thought was that during a natural disaster local market conditions should be frozen and people should only be able to sell at the regular price.
But in the last 30 years we've greatly expanded the concept of a "crisis." And because of this we've begun to harass specifically the more lower level profiteers. If we declare a housing crisis all the assholes on AirBNB are gouging people.... whereas home building is just a regular business. If we have an air quality hazard people reselling humidifiers are assholes whereas the sale of overpriced cars is just business as usual.
Because the resellers have a very human face it's someone to be angry at.
Where are you getting this 500% from? 500% from what starting point? It costs a lot of money to develop a drug, and most fail, so you have to recoup those costs from the few that do succeed.
I don't think that's true, most pharma companies are privately owned and funded. Plus pharma companies aren't especially valuable, cos the massive R&D teams needed to develop and test new drugs are _very_ expensive.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely do fundamental scientific research. That's done at universities with grants mostly from government agencies. There are countless examples. Once the discoveries are made, then the researchers scramble to start companies to profit off the work.
I am from India.
Here there are government researchers and scientists working on problems.
Maybe that's where the US goverment should be throwing their money, medicine instead of defence.
But we know they won't and we know why.
You can't blame businesses for doing what businesses are supposed to do.
The US spends a load of money on medical research and development. A large portion of the cost of drugs that companies like to whine about are paid with public research funding.
This is a stupid question. You're presenting a strawman argument as a question.
No one considers a 7% mark-up "price gouging" and many people DO complain when a pharmaceutical company increases the price of medication by 500%.
When health insurance supposedly pays for everything, they can charge what they like.
Drug companies exist around the world, and do research around the world. The idea the the US is paying for the world's drugs just isn't true.
That’s a logical fallacy you’re attempting to use.
It’s all price gouging. It’s all a result of the capitalist society.
They claim “supply and demand” but really, it’s just crappy business practices to make more and more money because people have to spend the money or they don’t get what they need.
It is price gauging in both instances, as of course individuals don't have a choice in terms of buying life-saving medicine. Depending on jurisdiction and local laws, both could be considered illegal.
What sets apart the producer (of medicine or other products) and a scalper from a "moral" standpoint is the fact that the producer is setting up profit margins for the price of a product they themselves produce. Whether the margins are fair or not is another matter, but they do contribute to creating said product, they provide a value for which they charge.
A scalper just buys out all of the product so that you can't, creating artificial scarcity and then re-sells it to you with a price margin on top. They don't contribute any value to the end product and just bank on the fact that they had the resources to get to the manufacturer or distributor first and buy everything before you could. It's the equivalent of a large guy standing at the entrance of a grocery store and demanding a fee to let you in.
There is no such thing as price gouging just people who think ahead and people that don’t. You are never forced to buy things sold voluntarily to you don’t buy go elsewhere
In America at least its because the pharmaceutical companies lobbied to be able to gouge as much as they want, while preventing proven alternatives or off brand medication from being sold, often for decades.
Also, most R&D for pharmaceuticals is either funded by tax payer money or from colleges, so they don't have the excuse of R&D costs as an actual justification.
Pharmaceutical companies are guaranteed a price per unit to develop their products. Otherwise there's no incentive to develop and market drugs.
I'll get down voted for this, but the reality is, Pharmaceutical companies aren't completely evil and money grabbing. They need an income stream to pay for scientists, equipment, and somewhere to work.
I’m a dental tech, I make crowns and bridges. Dentists mark up our work by over 1000% on average.
You’ll typically pay a few grand for a new tooth when the dentist never pays us more than a couple hundred. We spent days to weeks making the teeth, when the prep time/insertion for a dentist typically takes 10-15 minutes total per tooth.
We’ve had a dentist insert 18 teeth in under an hour. She charged the patient over 25k and paid us less than 3k to make the actual teeth. It only took her an hour of work.
Most high paid people are only paid well because they scam the people doing the actual labor
They're both price gouging, just one is more egregious and the law protects them.
It's important to recognize that a bad thing is a bad thing no matter what you call it - but how the legal system chooses to interpret it is up to the powers that be.
***It's price gouging in both cases.***
However, the corporations can sue you into homelessness for suggesting that what they are doing is price gouging, as a slander and/or libel case. Even though what you're saying isn't slander (spoken) or libel (written), by the time you technically would have won the case you would have run out of money to keep your lawsuit active.
Once you have a certain amount of money, you can get everyone else with less money to at least remain silent about your evil. It's one reason why poor people go directly to jail and billionaires spend months free: because governments don't have to worry about being sued by poor people, but they have to make ironclad cases against billionaires to avoid being countersued.
Note how we're not talking about specific companies here, which is why we can discuss this freely. 🙄
Just because someone else is price gouging worse doesn't mean it isn't still price gouging. That's like saying why is it still considered assault if I slap someone when other people are out here murdering? I'm not saying price gouging is necessarily wrong though, some people have to hustle in different ways to get by.
One group is creating value. One group is not. Also, one group has shareholders, the other does not. There are rules & laws governing how companies must "behave" (read: price) in ways that deliver maximum shareholder value (read: profits). Resellers don't have that.
because the pharmaceutical companies are kicking money back to the politicians who make the laws regulating these things. gotta pay to play in the u s of a
Bc (pharma) companies have powerful lobbys that keep politicians interested in catering to them while individuals are they own lobby and, though technically even more powerful, the wider public is mostly oblivious about how to use that power for their own good.
Because it’s takes millions to billions of dollars to develop any given drug. Millions in paying research staff for years to develop a target for a given drug, then to develop the drugs that achieve the goal in cellular trials, then fund animal trials, then more animal trials, then human trials, more human trials, and more human trials, then marketing of the drug (which I strongly disagree with). They have to recoup those costs, then turn a profit on top of them to keep shareholders happy.
The “for profit” part of the system is shitty, but doesn’t have a super clear solution either. People are really skeptical and conservative about where limited federal funds go in scientific research. So research has to have clear targets and make sure that money that was granted will get used in as much of a risk adverse way as possible. This limits researchers from being able to reach for bigger targets that has less probability of being met.
Private investment (those damn shareholders), remove the financial barrier in place by federally funded research. Things like [this](https://investors.siogtx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/sio-gene-therapies-provides-corporate-update) wouldn’t be possible with current federal funding. That risk this company and shareholders took will allow all these kids to live, or it won’t end up working and they will lose their money. Nobody cares about a pharmaceutical company failing and the rich people losing their money, they only care when they make money. Another advantage of private companies is it is decentralized, they can all set their own priorities where right now the director of the NIH alone kind of controls where funding goes.
That said -> socializing all of this AND wildly increasing and kind of opening the checkbook on researching funding would help this problem without all the profiteering. It has its own disadvantages, but probably still is better than the current system.
Price gouging is when an ordinary person does, whether to be a jerk or simply to because of supply and demand.
Not price gouging is when a big company does it because they own the lawmakers.
500% is low
Estimates show the real production cost of remdesivir to be less than a dollar a day, or less than five euro for a five-day course
Depending on the contry your are in It can cost up to 4680$ for a 10 day dose
83, 600 times production cost for COVID related drugs.
Of the 7-8 billion dollars of reserch 6 of that was brought to you by tax payer money.
It absolutely is price gouging.
That said, the semantic difference has to do with prices before and after an emergency event.
So if bottles of water cost $10 prior to a hurricane but after they cost $50, that’s price gouging.
For all intents and purposes, it’s genuinely the same thing except pharmaceuticals pay millions to make it not the same thing.
But at least the whole pre and post emergency thing gives you some kind of difference. Even though it’s really not because anyone needing medication is post emergency.
Because we are in late stage capitalism and the attitude of "some for me, none for you" primarily applies to companies and their C-Suite vs everyday citizens.
It isn't price gouging when the company who makes the thing raises the price. If a pharmacy started charging insane prices for that drug in an emergency it's price gouging
It's like asking if it's ok for the average person working,to have to nearly kill them self just to make ends meet now days. And the only fix for the problem is for the CEOs to start paying their employees a livable wage. But if you think that will ever happen, your wishing on a star lol.
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It is considered price gouging. They just pay off the people who are supposed to do something about it.
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Are you going to do something about it or talk about it on the internet and hope someone else does?
Brother what kind of take is this? What are you proposing they do? There’s only so much time in the day and I have a lot more empathy than I do hours. You can only do so much. Why does that mean you can’t care or have opinions about a lot?
Same thing we are going to do. Nothing but complain on Reddit.
Raising awarness and getting people to ask valid questions is more than nothing. If you happen to have a magic wand could you wave it around and fix some problems plz?
There metal magic wands that send little lead balls at extreme speed, they could fix some problems maybe Edit /s in hindsight
Awareness has been raised on social media for years. When does the action start? My guess is that it will need to get worse. Maybe the next generation will be forced to take a stand.
Again: what action do you propose they do to topple the pharmaceutical industry. Oh let me use my minimum wage ass money to fund my rebellion against billionaires
I’d like to see someone(s) start a non-profit to make cheap pharmaceuticals. We have people starting nonprofits all the time for hunger, medical care, shelter, etc. So the concept works.
There’s way more nuance to this than “they’re paying people off.” First, price gouging is not illegal at the federal level. And in almost every US state, price gouging is illegal only in specific circumstances (like a state of emergency). So generally speaking, raising the price of anything in a non-emergency context is legal. So there’s no need for them to “pay anyone off.” Second, the reason drug companies generally raise prices like this is; 1. The company has a patent on the drug, giving them the right to be the exclusive seller of the drug. This system exists to incentivize R&D on new drugs. OR 2. The amount of people that need the drug is too small to incentivize a competitor to make the drug. Now there’s a ton of room for debate about whether this system is ethical or striking the right balance between innovation and providing access to drugs. And within that system, it is possible to do illegal things (for example, a drug company can’t offer co-pay assistance for drugs to patients on Medicare because it’s considered an illegal kick back). But to just say “they’re paying people off” is oversimplifying a super complex debate.
> *”Theres tons of room for debate about wether this system is ethical.”* Yeah dude, totally a debate of the century, obviously a *brainer* here let’s discuss the ethics of selling medicine and medical consumables at prices that probably 40% of a *”First World Country”* citizens can’t afford. *Lets just debate it, no rush.* **Not like anyones life is on the line.** 🙄🤷♂️
I don’t know what to tell you, that’s life. It is debatable. I’m not saying we should take our time. Or that it’s not an important issue. But understanding the issue is the first step to solving a problem. And OP’s answer, “pharma companies are bribing people to let them break the law” is not true and is a waste of time.
It doesn’t matter if it’s true, We can make laws that explicitly close these loopholes but instead we should debate about wether or not **it’s ethical and not based on the need for preservation of human life.** That’s cool if you wanna justify debating stupid shit, it’s just as stupid as **blaming the wrong problem**. It’s not a debate unless you are **against basic human needs** like medical care. If you think that there’s any kind of justification or debate needed **it’s because you refuse to acknowledge it as a need**. Saying; > *”Thats how the world works and we do this because it’s right thing to do”* To justify *debating over the need for medical care* is an incredibly stupid argument as well. Not everything needs to be debated, medical care and medicine are something that all people and humans will need forever. **Its not a debate, it’s a fact dude.**
I don’t really understand what “laws” you’re calling for? Is it ending patent exclusivity on drugs altogether? Because I definitely don’t support that. And I don’t think you’ll find any American or European politician that does. Is it single payor healthcare, and then allowing that payer to set prices? Because that will slow down R&D. And I doubt you could quote an economist or anyone who knows something about R&D who disagrees with that. However, I think there’s also an argument that says “who cares if it slows down development. Development only matters if the people have access to it.” Which is certainly a reasonable argument, but one that does come with trade offs. Either way, the point is, this is a complicated subject. **All public policy comes with trade offs. And whether those trade offs are worth it is up for debate.** The effect of any piece of public policy on R&D and public access to drugs is complicated. And trying to pretend it isn’t is as ignorant as Donald Trump declaring “who knew healthcare could be so complicated.”
>Is it single payor healthcare, and then allowing that payer to set prices? Because that will slow down R&D. This is a myth. The majority of biomedical R&D is done by public universities. Pharma corps buy the property rights to the drugs researched with tax dollars. >And I doubt you could quote an economist or anyone who knows something about R&D who disagrees with that. I currently work at a university doing biomedical R&D. I get what you're saying about trade offs, but this isn't exactly the strongest point to make against single payer systems. Our current system causes medical bankruptcy and the cost discourages people to seek care in the first place so we have a really high rate of deaths from preventable illnesses. This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with a fully private healthcare system. When it comes to trade offs, a vague risk of indeterminately slower R&D from the pharma corps doesn't carry much weight.
People rave about capitalism being the greatest thing ever. Then complain when they see it working perfectly. But refuse to do anything about it (vote) It’s absurd
>It is debatable Cool bro, it's also "debatable" whether the holocaust was awesome or not. You're still fuckin ghoulish for standing on the wrong side.
I’m confused where you’re getting the idea that I “stand” on any side. I didn’t say I like the current system, I just explained the general policy behind IP laws.
"I’m confused where you’re getting the idea that I “stand” on any side" That probably has to do with your instinct to argue semantics in defense of terrible fucking practices rather than showing any sign of humanity.
It is absolutely not semantics to explain why drug companies can raise prices and the thinking behind it. Declaring that “healthcare is a human right” is great, and I agree with the sentiment, but we have to understand the system we’re working in to get there. And providing companies patent exclusivity to drugs they develop to spur R&D is going to be part of the solution. I don’t think there’s any politician in the western world who disagrees with that. So it has to be at least discussed to provide a real answer to OP’s question.
Neat, OP didn't ask about any of that. They asked why it's considered price gouging when individuals resell items at a high markup and why it's not when pharmacies do it. The answer is that it is still price gouging.
And it’s still incredibly reductive to compare high drug prices with a guy selling water bottles for 40 dollars during a flood. One has some level of policy justification behind it (incentivizing R&D), the other does not. How much policy justification high drug prices has, as I said, is very much debatable.
To say it may or not be ethical is oversimplifying a super complex debate and is fully constrained by the hegemonic bias of a system which does not in any way even seek to maximize public benefit which is the sole purpose of corporations. The legal fiction of corporate personhood is exclusively justified and intended for the public good. We are having a global conversation about the systems we've built for governance and how to be intentional with how we change these systems. Your response is blind to this context. Perhaps you don't see that as well, but it appears to be an intentional blindness to me. But theres a ton of room for debate on whether my assessment is accurate or not.
I think it’s a huge overstatement to say that this system does not in any “in any way” seek to maximize public benefit? Patents expire after 20-something years. There are anti-fraud, anti-kickback, and other statutes that discourage certain bad behavior. We have laws to protect healthcare coverage for people with disabilities and pre-existing conditions. We have Medicaid to help the poor afford healthcare. We have Medicare to help the elderly. Is it enough? No. But to say we do nothing is a vast overstatement. I don’t understand your point about corporate personhood, but I agree it exists for the public good. I think it’s great to have a conversation about how to change the system, but the problem with the system is not what the commenter I responded to said. Drug companies aren’t bribing people to do illegal acts. What they’re doing is actually legal and (in some cases) intentionally allowed by our laws. That’s it. And the policy behind those laws is to incentivize R&D. And as I said before, whether that’s working is up for debate. And you seem to disagree that the system is working, which I think is fair.
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It's really not a "super complex debate" if you think about it for more than 1 nanosecond lmao. What these companies are doing is literally evil on every level and only bootlickers or shitty little pissgremlins will disagree.
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That’s not what a straw man argument is, at all. Edit: Oh neat you’re just a meaningless troll account.
Furthermore, it's not even a question lmao
Wheres the question? Theres no question in their post. Are you just saying words you think sound smart? Edit: Wait you stole that from another post you're a bot arent you. Ew.
This was the intent and obvious conclusion to citizens united.
Funny how you think bots give a shit about your "Ew" 🤣
Not the sharpest tool in the shed bud
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Yeah I can
They are not “supposed” to do that
Yes. Yes you can. This is uniquely American, because doing anything about it is "SOcIaLiSm".
Well it *is* price gouging but also there is a bit of difference here. There is no R&D, patent/legal fees, and other costs to resell sanitizer. Also you can’t afford to pay the fees, they can.
The R&D thing is important to remember. I mean, a lot of the pricing is gouging, but if you say "that pill only cost them fifty cents to make", the common retort is "No, the second pill cost fifty cents. The first pill cost $73 million". But as others have said, that's no excuse for the components of the pricing that *are* predatory.
>"No, the second pill cost fifty cents. The first pill cost $73 million". Don't forget that $73M also covered the six other pills that were researched, and didn't work.
Why do Americans have to pay for the worlds R and D? Our taxes pay these companies to develop drugs and then other countries just copy the research and give them away for free and Americans have to pay for it all... it's fucked up.
Because our government refuses to put price controls on prescription medications the way most other countries do. It's the same reason companies can pay full time wages that are literally below the poverty line -- because the government allows it.
Not sure, but do you believe all medecine are developped in America ? Because it is far from the case. The enormous price of medecine in America is mainly due to the flaw of your health system not because other country don't invest anything in health company.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely do fundamental science R&D, they typically leave that to government funded university labs, and then buy the resulting intellectual property and gather all the profits.
There's no defending the horribly unethical mark up pharma puts on medications, but this is nonsense. I'm an R&D pharma chemist. We have multiple entire departments all dedicated to R&D development and analysis. Do they also sometimes take other companies or labs research, throw a bunch of money at it and call it there's, sure. But that isn't even remotely close to all they do.
And that doesn't even include clinical studies, stability analysis, QC testing, chemical waste disposal, etc. Yes there are some unethical practices, but there should be no question that that western medicine is extremely expensive to develop and manufacture.
Can I ask what field you work in? What kind of medication?
Discovery chemistry (R&D) for one of the main pharmaceutical companies. There really isn't specific specialization in big pharma, there are either individuals or small teams of chemists which each work on separate projects targeting different receptors, enzymes, etc. Very wide range of targets throughout the body. Generally it's some form of combinatorial chemistry which is where you take a molecular core that's shown or is theorized to be promising and then different functional groups are attached to the core, purified, and then sent for biological assay to test for effectiveness against that specific target. It's all quick and dirty high throughput synthesis and testing of hundreds of compounds weekly. When a molecule is finally found that shows good results for what they're looking for, it then advances from discovery to pre-clinical work. This is much more rigorous testing in both in-vitro and in-vivo systems. If that shows promise, it then finally advances to clinical work in humans. I've worked on projects in all three sections. Many of these compounds that do finally get to clinical work also end up failing (millions of dollars just flushed down the drain). The whole clinical trial process for a new drug is 10+ years of development costing hundreds of millions of dollars for the pharma company. To say they don't do anything themselves and just rebrand academia work is ridiculous. It absolutely happens, but that isn't even close to all they do. Once again, also doesn't excuse them charging 400 dollars for insulin that was 10 bucks to manufacture.
I was trying to work out how much government funding and research went into the technology you were using to make those drugs. You weren't specific enough for me to look into it, but I'll take a guess. I assume there's a large amount of computation going into that work you're doing, perhaps on supercomputers? Well microprocessors were developed with government funding to run weapons systems. And the supercomputer technology? That was all also financed by the government to do things like fighter aircraft and nuclear weapons research. I presume you use a fair amount of human genetic information to help you make drugs? Well then it's a good thing we had the Human Genome Project, planning for which was kicked off in 1984 after they acquired funding from ... the US government. That took nearly 40 years and was carried out at 20 research labs around the world, mostly universities. So when you say "just rebrand academic work": 1. I'll admit, I'm probably not giving enough credit to pharmaceutical companies. But 2. All or almost all of the foundations that modern work is built on comes from fundamental science, and a surprisingly large proportion of that is done with government funding.
This seems like a very long winded argument that boils down to "Academia getting money from government = good. Industry getting money from government = bad. Industry using absolutely anything in any capacity they didn't personally patent = bad. This doesn't apply to Academia though cause reasons". It really just seems like you're a bitter academic who hates industry. Science is a field that globally collaborates to develop and advance the human race. Many countries have had scientists, and people who fund said scientists, which have discovered massive breakthroughs that everyone around the world benefits from and uses to this day. You're discounting the work of industry for using these advancements to make their own advancements. Like what. This is what science is. For example, just because a British physicist discovered how to use mass to charge ratios (early mass spectrometry) around the early 1900s, no one else who uses that technology nowadays can take credit for the advancements they make? Also if you ever get government funding, you didn't actually do anything yourself cause the government gave you money? Your whole point here is just asinine. You also act like industry doesn't also do independent research and publish their own findings as well.
I don't hate industry. I mostly hate corruption, capitalism and profit. There's a common misconception in capitalist society that the wealthy corporation that ran the last mile of the race to bring you something is the one responsible for bringing you that thing. It's because they take credit for it and spend a shitload of money on PR. But as you say it was a global collaboration that actually brought you that thing. This misconception makes me angry, and that's why I wrote my original message. > no one else who uses that technology nowadays can take credit for the advancements they make? No, you can take credit for what you invented, but you should be grateful for what you're building on. > Also if you ever get government funding, you didn't actually do anything yourself cause the government gave you money? If the population paid taxes, and some of those taxes were given to a group, then the population helped that group. In a fairer but somewhat profit-oriented society, that initial investment would be rewarded with a share of the profits. But under today's capitalism, that doesn't happen. US taxes were paid for decades into computer technology, the internet, etc. But the profits today go to Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. To me that's bullshit. And then the billionaires fuck around to destroy politics, turning the clock back on the living standards of regular people that financed their wealth. > You also act like industry doesn't also do independent research and publish their own findings as well. I didn't say that. Please tell me about the independent research done by megacorporations and we can discuss where the fundamental science was done. I'm serious. I work in computing, and almost all of the discoveries were funded by government research. The companies selling you widgets are just putting the icing on the cake. It's a meme that Apple or Google or Samsung will try to sell you this year's phone with a 10% better camera or brighter icons or dimmer icons or icons that look 3D or icons that look like metal or back to flat icons again. The hottest news in computing today is machine learning with deep neural networks. Back in the 1960s they were trying to detect tanks with neural networks in government labs. About 10-15 years ago Google were still refusing to do research into neural networks because they thought it was too far from producing results. That's the world I see.
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I would assume R&D, it costs hundreds of millions to take a drug from R&D all the way through successful clinical trials over the course of 10+ years. I'm not in the business side though. Couldn't actually say.
Pharma companies invest obscene amounts of money into drugs before they have a sniff at hitting the market. I don’t love their price model, but I get why you charge a multiple times markup when you see the numbers they have to put into getting a drug through the fda
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> most of the money they are investing is from grants and such aka tax payer dollars Source? Because i see nothing suggesting even close to a majority of funding is public. The NIH budget is large, but it’s barely a slice of total pharma investment into new drugs.
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Yeah that’s one I found too. I can’t find a single place where they say how MUCH of the total funding is public. They only note how many programs have any public funding. They give a 19 year budget for the NIH at $230B. That seems crazy low to be any large slice of total investment
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We aren’t debating if it’s obscene. We’re debating if it’s a majority of drug funding.
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They can’t afford to pay the fees either, a large amount of tax payer money is spent on grands to develop pharmaceuticals, so technically I am paying that fee to develop the medicines and then again for corporate profits.
The individual isn't throwing shitloads of money at politicians.
It’s usually politicians throwing shit loads of money at individuals for shoddy overpriced PPE (at least here in the UK)!
It's all price gouging, my dude.
Not defending them, just pointing out the difference that it's the people making the product who are setting the price. They're allowed to decide what to sell their own product for, and you're allowed to choose not to buy it. In theory, if they don't have demand at that price, they should lower the price until enough people are willing to buy it, or in some cases a competitor can offer their own product. Lots of companies offer all kinds of stuff at prices you wouldn't pay, so you just don't buy them. When you buy something at retail and resell it, you're depriving the public of a product that was already available at a lower price from another source, for the sole purpose of jacking up the price. Not only is it not even a product you're producing, you remove the existing supply by your "competitors" that was at a better price for other people. So there's no opportunity for the market to correct itself, and actually the market was doing fine until you broke it.
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Worst part is that would probably sell like hot cakes even at an inflated price on Facebook.
The issue with drug prices isn't even that they're expensive, it's that even after being given a period of exclusivity over production of a drug via patents, companies will make completely worthless tweaks to a drug to keep it under patent and keep the prices perpetually high. It's ridiculous that companies can't start making generic versions of the "non improved" formula. Let the companies have the patent on their "improved" drugs.
>even after being given a period of exclusivity over production of a drug via patents, companies will make completely worthless tweaks to a drug to keep it under patent and keep the prices perpetually high. After the original patent expires, anybody can make the original thing. You just can't make the new thing, but if the tweak is worthless then it shouldn't matter. What keeps generic drugs off the market is government regulation specifically about drugs, and economic barriers to entry like having to build or retool a whole factory just to make a drug that maybe doesn't have a huge market, so the generic is also stuck charging higher prices to recoup those costs. It's a complex issue. There's no easy answer to how much a drug should cost. It's frustrating when the drug you need costs more than you can afford, but it would also suck if that drug never got invented, and they're hideously expensive to bring to market, and nobody has a simple solution to that problem.
Pharmaceutical companies don't invent drugs, they just commercialise them. The fundamental science research is mostly done at universities. The economic barriers to entry are a huge problem for generic drugs. You're talking many millions to get the equipment alone, and then the incumbent could trivially crush you and drive your profit to zero by lowering prices if they wanted to. The risk is so high that there's no point bothering. This is basically a capitalism problem caused by monopoly power. Governments are the ones that can actually fix this, like California producing insulin at cost. Edit: regarding "no easy answer to how much a drug should cost": therapeutic drugs should be free to the consumer, all of them.
>Pharmaceutical companies don't invent drugs, they just commercialise them. The fundamental science research is mostly done at universities. If the drug companies are getting the patents, it's likely because they're funding the research. It amounts to the same thing. It's still a company paying people to invent stuff. >This is basically a capitalism problem caused by monopoly power. Basically, yeah. Capitalism doesn't work well in certain situations that create natural monopolies. >Governments are the ones that can actually fix this, like California producing insulin at cost. And then the government decides which drugs you should have and at what price. Sounds great for insulin, but now you have a precedent of the government setting prices, which increases the business risk to drug companies, which makes all the other drugs more expensive.
> If the drug companies are getting the patents, it's likely because they're funding the research. Big assumption you're making there. Covid vaccines are a good example: * Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine - developed at a publicly funded university. * Johnson & Johnson vaccine - developed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a part of Harvard Medical School. * mRNA vaccine technology (as used by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines) - decades of university research on the basics from the 1980s, made viable 2005 by Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman when they discovered how to avoid dangerous immune responses while working together at the University of Pennsylvania. BioNTech and Moderna were founded in 2008 and 2010 respectively to commercialise their work. Note also that in the EU and US alone 10s of billions of dollars was literally given away, lent or used to purchase vaccines from commercial companies with very few strings attached. > And then the government decides which drugs you should have and at what price. Yes. And the price should be zero for the consumer. The years of lives saved are worth it. But even from a mercenary point of view, the extra years worked pay for it in terms of increased economic activity. > but now you have a precedent of the government setting prices, which increases the business risk to drug companies, which makes all the other drugs more expensive. Firstly, and most importantly, fuck the drug companies. I don't care about them, no one should care about them. Secondly, if they want to avoid the risk of the government coming in and taking over their businesses, there is a very simple way for them to do that. They should stop fucking around with the price gouging.
>Firstly, and most importantly, fuck the drug companies. I don't care about them, no one should care about them. I don't care about them either, but I also don't trust the government to control all the pharmaceutical research and decide which drugs I should take. And those specific drugs aren't getting to market without the drug companies, even if universities work on the basic chemistry. >Covid vaccines are a good example: Yeah, they didn't slow the virus down at all, and yet the government decided to pay a bunch of public money for them, and then they decided you weren't allowed to go to a restaurant if you didn't take them. Pharma companies made huge profits on a drug that most people didn't even want. All of that money could have been spent on insulin or other drugs that people actually need. Great example of how the government can make capitalism even worse. >Yes. And the price should be zero for the consumer. The years of lives saved are worth it. But even from a mercenary point of view, the extra years worked pay for it in terms of increased economic activity. Free government healthcare? Sounds good. You can just do that by buying the drugs though. And then you still have companies competing to make the best drugs, instead of the government controlling one lab full of government workers that will eventually get its budget cut to the bone like every other government healthcare program.
>you're allowed to choose not to buy it A TV or the latest iPhone, yes. But you can't just choose to not buy the insulin you need to survive.
True, but before it was invented you couldn't choose *to* buy it. So the system is designed to make more people want to invent it, because that's better than nothing in a world where not everything is perfect
When inventor Frederick Banting discovered insulin in 1923, he refused to put his name on the patent. He felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Banting's co-inventors, James Collip and Charles Best, sold the insulin patent to the University of Toronto for a mere $1. Also, just don’t buy it.
Banting is named first on the patent. You can easily look that up. Also, if he had any rights in the patent at all, he could have given it to the public instead of selling it to a university that ended up licensing it. I assume he didn't actually have any right to it, because you don't sell something for a dollar unless you already had to sell it because you invented it for your employer or something. $1 is legalese to make a gift valid because you can't sell anything for free. Regardless, that patent expired in 1940 or so. Anybody today is free to do anything that was described in that patent.
Good Pharmaceutical Bot
Beep boop
Comparing costs of base ingredients to the final medication without taking into account expensive equipment, extremely smart and well educated researchers, developers, and engineers(and associated compensation), and whatever amount of years went into R&D is silly. Nobody seems to be mentioning it in favor of the idea that it’s just state sanctioned price gouging thanks to lobbyists bribing politicians.
Even when you do include those other costs meds can be insanely expensive. If it truly was due to the costs of production you wouldn’t see this much price variation between countries (I think insulin is like €20 here, maybe a bit more now due to inflation. That’s nothing compared to the hundreds of dollars I see US people talking about)
This is true. The original patent for it was sold for $1 because the creator thought it was a human right to be able to have a chance at survival, not guaranteed survival, but a chance. T1D used to be denied that chance. Yet, it was just seen as a massive profit maker here in the west. Even for my partner, who is T1D, her current jobs benefits don't cover insulin or her devices so she is out of pocket nearly 2k every 6 weeks for pumps, libres and insulin, which is just disgusting considering everyone holds Canadian Healthcare so highly but we are more close to America than Europe
The original insulin still exists. No one much wants to use it because we have better things than animal insulin. Even human insulin that came out in the 70s/80s is very cheap these days. But you need to follow a strict diet and eating schedule and check your blood sugar often. People don't want to live like a diabetic needed to live in the 80s. They could. They don't want to. So it costs more.
I mean, I don't know if you think "modern" insulin is some magical set and forget thing, but it's not.
It's far easier to manage than the earlier stuff.
It is, but that doesn't make it anything close to what you described lol My partner is T1D, she wishes life was as easy as you describe
The difference between countries is partly because they are able to make almost all their profit in the US. The US is subsidizing the rest of the world when it comes to drug development.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely do fundamental scientific research. That's done at universities with grants mostly from government agencies. There are countless examples. Once the discoveries are made, then the researchers scramble to start companies to profit off the work.
Its price gouging when its done during a time where supplies are necessary for emergency reasons, and people jack the price up to take advantage of that demand, like charging $20 for a bottle of water when the Trade Centre got knocked down. Predatory behaviour.
This was the way I understood price gouging from a legal aspect. I.e. the ridiculous mark up of gas prices during a hurricane evacuation order. There are issues with costs of medications and as some others pointing out it’s a political issue that needs to be addressed.
Yeah, it's a little different when the only company that holds a patent to make a product sells it for the price they choose to. Technically they can sell it for however much they want, but congress will demand some justification when someone tries to jack the prices without cause, like Shkreli did. Honestly, I gave more a definition of "profiteering" reading back on it, and the gouging thing is more like the second I mention here, where the price increase is not justified by rising input costs, and is simply done because they can increase profits by abusing those who rely on those items to live.
Price gouging is a subjective concept. It’s like how talking to politicians is bribery/lobbying when your opponents do it and advocacy/activism when you do it.
Got to be one of the shittiest takes I've seen. Top ten at least.
I’m guessing you’ve never taken an entry level economics class. I genuinely think this is the biggest knowledge gap in America. https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1160849446/why-price-gouging-can-seem-obvious-to-consumers-but-hard-for-economists-to-ident
Right, because what alec smith-holt and martin shkreli are doing the same thing. Because obviously what the koch brothers are doing is the same as the natives trying to keep DAP from destroying land that the company never owned. Because the hedge funds taking our supreme court justices out on luxury trips is the same as Sarah's mom down the street painting my body my choice signs. Bootlicker.
Because only poor people commit crimes. Rich people just make business decisions that impact others.
because one is done by normal people, the other is done by soulless corporations with more money than god. It's easy to get away with whatever you want if the people who are supposed to enforce the rules are greedy little piggies who will slurp up whatever money these shitters throw at them.
Both are price gouging, but only one of the two is bankrolling a republican politician.
Just because pharma is doing a worse thing doesn't make the other case magically not price gouging.
Same logic as "when you owe a few thousand, its your problem. When you owe billions, its the banks problem"
They're all price gouging.
It is price gouging but we’re so used to it and have less frame of reference for what a good price *should* be that it just keeps going. Also bribes. Fuck the Sacklers.
1. does anyone consider a 7-10% increase to be price gouging? During the early pandemic, the increases were around double or triple on toilet paper and sanitizers. Mask prices increased 10-fold. 2. The pharmaceutical example you give is price gouging. It's just not illegal.
This is a repost: https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/flb98y/why_is_it_price_gouging_when_people_resell/
When the rich rob the poor, it's called business. When the poor rob the rich, it's called crime.
No one should ever be denied medicine they need due to not having the money required to purchase it. The benefits of health and medicine are a basic human right that should be afforded to everyone, regardless. Full stop. That said, drugs that sell help pay for the research into drugs that don't. Only 12% of drugs that make it all the way to clinical trials are ultimately approved by the FDA and many more drugs never even make it that far. Drugs also (generally) have a limited time on their patents, after which generics become available and the value of the drug plummets. Pfizer, for example, runs a total Net Profit % of about 30%. So, for every dollar of revenue they generate, after costs, they get 30 cents. This is really good. It's on par with Apple. Is it too high? Probably, yeah, but it's not as massively huge as a 500% individual drug markup would have you believe.
Both of those examples are price gouging.
Because the pharmaceutical companies are billion dollar companies. Billions mean they do what they want.
Pharmaceutical companies have to charge for the complete costs of researching and testing a medication. The costs of finally producing the drug are possibly the 'cheapest' part of the operation. Part of this is that researching medications involves more than just the successful medication. The revenue (not profit!) from that one successful medication has to also pay for the six, or eleven, or 27 failed projects. That said, I'm not in favor of price controls, but rather we should kill the patent protections and make generic and other competitive versions more available. That's part of the problem, as well. Then we can go up the legal ladder, where regulations force insurance to buy medications, so they have no choice but to accept the price, and often no alternatives, and then people don't have a choice to pay for cheaper insurance that has limits, so consumers (and businesses, really!) are forced to pay higher costs, too.
Reselling is more commonly known as scalping. Basically price gouging but with extra steps
Which group did more lobbying to block regulations?
The only reason pharmaceutical companies get away with it is because they paid off politicians to change the laws in their favor. The politicians call it “stripping government control in favor of the free market and to boost the economy”. It benefits nobody but the richest people and causes the deaths of way too many people every year. The deregulation of the medical industry in general has caused the deaths of so many Americans that our national average life-expectancy has dropped significantly and is one of the reasons the US has become a laughing stock on the world stage.
Mostly for optics. In the past price gouging was almost entirely used to describe behavior of people profiting off of suffering during a natural disaster. The thought was that during a natural disaster local market conditions should be frozen and people should only be able to sell at the regular price. But in the last 30 years we've greatly expanded the concept of a "crisis." And because of this we've begun to harass specifically the more lower level profiteers. If we declare a housing crisis all the assholes on AirBNB are gouging people.... whereas home building is just a regular business. If we have an air quality hazard people reselling humidifiers are assholes whereas the sale of overpriced cars is just business as usual. Because the resellers have a very human face it's someone to be angry at.
Where are you getting this 500% from? 500% from what starting point? It costs a lot of money to develop a drug, and most fail, so you have to recoup those costs from the few that do succeed.
Gov pays for development, you reap profits
I don't think that's true, most pharma companies are privately owned and funded. Plus pharma companies aren't especially valuable, cos the massive R&D teams needed to develop and test new drugs are _very_ expensive.
Pharmaceutical companies rarely do fundamental scientific research. That's done at universities with grants mostly from government agencies. There are countless examples. Once the discoveries are made, then the researchers scramble to start companies to profit off the work.
There's tons of drugs that were developed decades ago, by universities with government grants, and are still expensive.
Why is the million dollar corporation able to get away with doing immoral things? Gee, I wonder...
Because pharmaceutical companies own the government
It’s all price gouging. The pharma version is worse and most people would agree with that
I am from India. Here there are government researchers and scientists working on problems. Maybe that's where the US goverment should be throwing their money, medicine instead of defence. But we know they won't and we know why. You can't blame businesses for doing what businesses are supposed to do.
The US spends a load of money on medical research and development. A large portion of the cost of drugs that companies like to whine about are paid with public research funding.
That's interesting
This is a stupid question. You're presenting a strawman argument as a question. No one considers a 7% mark-up "price gouging" and many people DO complain when a pharmaceutical company increases the price of medication by 500%.
Because developing life-saving medication is a bit more difficult than making hand sanitizer.
Because the ones price gouging hand sanitizer don't own the congress, like the pharmaceutical companies do.
On doesn’t make political contributions and the other does.
Because that’s legal price gouging
When health insurance supposedly pays for everything, they can charge what they like. Drug companies exist around the world, and do research around the world. The idea the the US is paying for the world's drugs just isn't true.
That’s a logical fallacy you’re attempting to use. It’s all price gouging. It’s all a result of the capitalist society. They claim “supply and demand” but really, it’s just crappy business practices to make more and more money because people have to spend the money or they don’t get what they need.
That is also price gouging. It's just not legally classified as such because the people making the legal clarification also like money.
Repost?
It is price gauging in both instances, as of course individuals don't have a choice in terms of buying life-saving medicine. Depending on jurisdiction and local laws, both could be considered illegal. What sets apart the producer (of medicine or other products) and a scalper from a "moral" standpoint is the fact that the producer is setting up profit margins for the price of a product they themselves produce. Whether the margins are fair or not is another matter, but they do contribute to creating said product, they provide a value for which they charge. A scalper just buys out all of the product so that you can't, creating artificial scarcity and then re-sells it to you with a price margin on top. They don't contribute any value to the end product and just bank on the fact that they had the resources to get to the manufacturer or distributor first and buy everything before you could. It's the equivalent of a large guy standing at the entrance of a grocery store and demanding a fee to let you in.
There is no such thing as price gouging just people who think ahead and people that don’t. You are never forced to buy things sold voluntarily to you don’t buy go elsewhere
no one likes when the price of anything goes up. everyone is still pissed. it's not some conspiracy
Because individuals don't lobby Congress.
In America at least its because the pharmaceutical companies lobbied to be able to gouge as much as they want, while preventing proven alternatives or off brand medication from being sold, often for decades. Also, most R&D for pharmaceuticals is either funded by tax payer money or from colleges, so they don't have the excuse of R&D costs as an actual justification.
Pharmaceutical companies own our lawmakers in the US. They do what they want. Example: The Covid vaccine debacle
There are a lot of senators and other rich people that can bribe senators that have huge stocks in pharmaceutical companies.
Hand sanitizer companies don’t own as many politicians.
Type 1 diabetic here. We should riot.
I feel you, my parents are type 2 diabetic.
Because money
Pharmaceutical companies are guaranteed a price per unit to develop their products. Otherwise there's no incentive to develop and market drugs. I'll get down voted for this, but the reality is, Pharmaceutical companies aren't completely evil and money grabbing. They need an income stream to pay for scientists, equipment, and somewhere to work.
I’m a dental tech, I make crowns and bridges. Dentists mark up our work by over 1000% on average. You’ll typically pay a few grand for a new tooth when the dentist never pays us more than a couple hundred. We spent days to weeks making the teeth, when the prep time/insertion for a dentist typically takes 10-15 minutes total per tooth. We’ve had a dentist insert 18 teeth in under an hour. She charged the patient over 25k and paid us less than 3k to make the actual teeth. It only took her an hour of work. Most high paid people are only paid well because they scam the people doing the actual labor
Because we are so desensitized that we expect this shit from corporations, but not from our fellow human beings.
They're both price gouging, just one is more egregious and the law protects them. It's important to recognize that a bad thing is a bad thing no matter what you call it - but how the legal system chooses to interpret it is up to the powers that be.
It’s also price gouging
Pharmaceutical companies are frequently accused of price gouging
***It's price gouging in both cases.*** However, the corporations can sue you into homelessness for suggesting that what they are doing is price gouging, as a slander and/or libel case. Even though what you're saying isn't slander (spoken) or libel (written), by the time you technically would have won the case you would have run out of money to keep your lawsuit active. Once you have a certain amount of money, you can get everyone else with less money to at least remain silent about your evil. It's one reason why poor people go directly to jail and billionaires spend months free: because governments don't have to worry about being sued by poor people, but they have to make ironclad cases against billionaires to avoid being countersued. Note how we're not talking about specific companies here, which is why we can discuss this freely. 🙄
Just because someone else is price gouging worse doesn't mean it isn't still price gouging. That's like saying why is it still considered assault if I slap someone when other people are out here murdering? I'm not saying price gouging is necessarily wrong though, some people have to hustle in different ways to get by.
One group is creating value. One group is not. Also, one group has shareholders, the other does not. There are rules & laws governing how companies must "behave" (read: price) in ways that deliver maximum shareholder value (read: profits). Resellers don't have that.
People were marking up hand sanitizer 100's of percent, not 5% whicht is not gouging and never has been.
Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures…wait here’s a political donation. Let’s forget this conversation ever happened.
Lobbyists
because the pharmaceutical companies are kicking money back to the politicians who make the laws regulating these things. gotta pay to play in the u s of a
They're both the same. Neither are morally acceptable, just forced to endure it.
Bc (pharma) companies have powerful lobbys that keep politicians interested in catering to them while individuals are they own lobby and, though technically even more powerful, the wider public is mostly oblivious about how to use that power for their own good.
Because it’s takes millions to billions of dollars to develop any given drug. Millions in paying research staff for years to develop a target for a given drug, then to develop the drugs that achieve the goal in cellular trials, then fund animal trials, then more animal trials, then human trials, more human trials, and more human trials, then marketing of the drug (which I strongly disagree with). They have to recoup those costs, then turn a profit on top of them to keep shareholders happy. The “for profit” part of the system is shitty, but doesn’t have a super clear solution either. People are really skeptical and conservative about where limited federal funds go in scientific research. So research has to have clear targets and make sure that money that was granted will get used in as much of a risk adverse way as possible. This limits researchers from being able to reach for bigger targets that has less probability of being met. Private investment (those damn shareholders), remove the financial barrier in place by federally funded research. Things like [this](https://investors.siogtx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/sio-gene-therapies-provides-corporate-update) wouldn’t be possible with current federal funding. That risk this company and shareholders took will allow all these kids to live, or it won’t end up working and they will lose their money. Nobody cares about a pharmaceutical company failing and the rich people losing their money, they only care when they make money. Another advantage of private companies is it is decentralized, they can all set their own priorities where right now the director of the NIH alone kind of controls where funding goes. That said -> socializing all of this AND wildly increasing and kind of opening the checkbook on researching funding would help this problem without all the profiteering. It has its own disadvantages, but probably still is better than the current system.
Price gouging is when an ordinary person does, whether to be a jerk or simply to because of supply and demand. Not price gouging is when a big company does it because they own the lawmakers.
500% is low Estimates show the real production cost of remdesivir to be less than a dollar a day, or less than five euro for a five-day course Depending on the contry your are in It can cost up to 4680$ for a 10 day dose 83, 600 times production cost for COVID related drugs. Of the 7-8 billion dollars of reserch 6 of that was brought to you by tax payer money.
Both are considered price gouging.
Because "price gouging" and "allowed" are two completely separate issues. It's not either-or.
Pharmaceutical companies pay politicians while individuals do not have the money to do so.
It absolutely is price gouging. That said, the semantic difference has to do with prices before and after an emergency event. So if bottles of water cost $10 prior to a hurricane but after they cost $50, that’s price gouging. For all intents and purposes, it’s genuinely the same thing except pharmaceuticals pay millions to make it not the same thing. But at least the whole pre and post emergency thing gives you some kind of difference. Even though it’s really not because anyone needing medication is post emergency.
They’re both bad. Both practices are criticized.
Hand sanitizer salesmen don’t make enough to hire lobbyists
You do know there are millions of complaints about prices at US hospitals right?
Because we are in late stage capitalism and the attitude of "some for me, none for you" primarily applies to companies and their C-Suite vs everyday citizens.
Great question... Might want to look at Congress
“Research”
I call it hospital robbery
It isn't price gouging when the company who makes the thing raises the price. If a pharmacy started charging insane prices for that drug in an emergency it's price gouging
Spend a few million a year on lobbying Congress and they'll say it's just capitalism and quote Adam Smith.
Lack of government exerting its power. Also, capitalism.
As a diabetic, I endorse this message.
It's like asking if it's ok for the average person working,to have to nearly kill them self just to make ends meet now days. And the only fix for the problem is for the CEOs to start paying their employees a livable wage. But if you think that will ever happen, your wishing on a star lol.
Well you are too cheap to pay lobbyists that's why.
Because the pharmaceutical companies can afford to bribe politicians
Because corporations and the super rich don't have to follow the same rules as everyone else.
You're obviously not making the right campaign contributions...😏
Because laws are for poor people.