Unregulated capitalism’s biggest enemy is a free market.
I mean, we know this. We saw it in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Canada’s gonna end up having to pay for a wall.
And they’ll do whatever they can to keep those prices going higher and higher:
Twenty leading drug companies—including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer, Novartis, and Mylan—were in cahoots for years to fix and dramatically inflate the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, in some cases to raising prices “well over 1,000 percent,” according to a lawsuit filed late last week by 44 states.
The alleged scheme was intended to ensure that each company was a “responsible competitor” who was “playing nice in the sandbox” to get its “fair share” of profits from the drugs. Those drugs included pills, capsules, ointments, and cream. They range from oral antibiotics, blood thinners, cancer drugs, contraceptives, statins, anti-inflammatory drugs, anti-depressants, blood pressure medications, drugs used to treat HIV, and drugs for ADHD. A full list of the generic drugs can be found here.
Incoming multi-billion-dollar settlement that admits no wrongdoing and nobody goes to jail.
Justice served!
Or in other words, the Drug makers behaved like a, wait for it…
…Drug Cartel!
This shit makes me so angry. Hold motherfuckers accountable, or the behavior will never change.
Source: 150 years of robber-baron capitalism.
Yeah, people need to go to jail or this will happen more.
Steal $100,000,000 from a single rich person and go to jail for life. Steal $100 from a million poor ones, and get a yearly bonus.
Every single person who collided needs to be held personally responsible for every dime. Take every penny they have. Break up the pharma companies so that Pfeizer doesn’t make their own generics. Put the CEOs in jail. Ruin them financially and make them live like paupers. Put their metaphorical heads on pikes.
And if that fails to change behavior, actual heads on pikes.
Bank of America getting the largest fines ever for laundering Mexican cartel money, but fines less than 10% of the yearly profit of such illicit activity isn’t a punishment, it’s an incentive.
No different here. The AGs need to demand blood.
Nah, just make nationally owned pharmaceutical manufactories, make the drugs ourselves, and tell Pharmas to go f@#$ themselves. If they whine, just hire away all their scientists. Going out of business is a great motivator to reduce prices.
That’s basically how I would “fix” health care. I’d sit all the major heath providers, private health organization, insurance companies and drug and medical companies, lock their representatives in a room, and tell them they have 30 days to come up with a plan that will lead to a 0 percent increase in health care costs this year and X reduction next year. They get to hit each other for cost reductions and who eats what bill where.
If they can’t because Prisoner’s Delimma and nobody wants to get the short stick and would rather let the whole system fall apart… then they all get to go out of business at the same time. I (as President) would tell every American to throw away ever heath care bill they had, then nationalize the entire health care system after everybody goes bankrupt at the same time.
Or, you know, take ‘em to that same room and show them the guillotines. Maybe let one or two try them out, pour encourager les autres.
All of this. The government cannot operate in fear of being mean or strict to corporations (and, critically, their officers and boards) who abuse the public and flaunt the rules.
Yes, people will lose jobs. You know what else caused job loss? Toppling the third Reich. Fuck the hypercapitalists. They are literally evil, and we must act together to break them before they break the planet.
This article has some major flaws. For instance,
The trouble is Sanofi didn’t identify the PCSK9 gene or link this protein-regulating gene to FH. Nor did the company have the idea to develop PCSK9 inhibitors to reduce the risk of cardiac events in those with this condition. Researchers at public hospitals and universities around the world collaborated on these tasks. Realizing the potential for profit, the drugmaker shepherded the therapy through later stage trials and FDA approval.
That’s a bit like saying, “Elon Musk didn’t invent batteries, cars, or even electric cars. So why are Teslas still so expensive?”
The fact is that the breakthrough steps of drug discovery - identifying genes, possible drug candidates, etc - are also the cheapest. So yes, it’s very likely that the scientists who did the initial experiments that led to CAR T-cell therapy were paid by the NIH and not a drug company.
The later steps that are FDA mandated - checking for long-term response and side effects, calibrating dosage, validating safe synthesis and distribution pipelines - are boring and expensive. It requires recruiting large numbers of patients and controls into a drug trial and generally is not supported by the NIH. Very often, the scientists responsible for initial discovery immediately sell their IP rights. They don’t want to be involved in further development, because it’s not particularly creative work. But someone has to do it, potentially eating the cost if it fails. And right now drug companies are the only ones who are willing.
I don’t read them as making that argument at all. I read them as making this argument:
Citing a 2014 report by the industry-funded Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, manufacturers have posited that it costs about $2.6 billion dollars to develop a new drug. The cost, according to consumer advocacy groups like Public Citizen, is actually closer to $161 million—an amount manufacturers can sometimes make back within days of introducing a product
Drug companies are lying about the cost of bringing new drugs to market in order to justify charging high prices for that drug.
Yet that cost is apparently far less than they spend on marketing and lobbying efforts, so it isn’t really expensive in relative terms at all. And drug companies continue to make very high profit margins — isn’t it the basically the highest-profit industry?
Well, they are studying 2 different things so not surprising the numbers are different. Public Citizen’s numbers for example ignore the clinical trial costs which are not cheap.
Yes, that’s another issue. If you follow the link, you’ll find that the $2.6 billion figure comes from a paper with multiple estimates, of which $2.6 billion is among the highest.
In contrast, the $161 million figure from Ralph Nader was reviewed along with various other estimates, and it is the very lowest.
As the NYT article points out, methodology matters. But it’s dishonest to imply that the lowest estimate must be the most accurate simply because it supports your argument.
Some drug companies are very profitable. Others do terribly. It’s a winner-take-all environment.
Not true. Research foundations often do. The CF Foundation has done this several times.
The CF Foundation, along with other foundations, may chip in some funds to help pay for drug trials. But ultimately the drug companies are financially responsible for them.
This page lists the Phase III trials supported by the CF Foundation. If you click on any of them, you’ll find that they are all overseen by a pharma company, for example Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Drug companies cite one number (the highest) and this article cites another (the lowest) and it is this article which is being dishonest?
That’s…special.