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>The current free market approach is completely failing this. It's not particularly profitable to invest many years in a drug people only need to take once to c

>The current free market approach is completely failing this. It's not particularly profitable to invest many years in a drug people only need to take once to cure a disease when compared to developing a drug people need to take for 5-10+ years to manage a disease. Why couldn't their payment scheme be identical even if it's a one time dose? Instead of $1000 per year for a drug you need to buy every year for ten years, make it so it has an up front cost of $12,000 or whatever with a ten year payment plan available for people who don't have that kind of cash on hand. This suggestion obviously inspired by the real world good that is a one time purchase that people make all the time: houses.

xg15 10y ago
Martin Shkreli approves. But to elaborate, aside from the obvious ethical implications, there are also practical differences. You are usually not forced out-of-the-blue to buy a house, no matter if you can afford it or have just bought a house last month. Also, houses can be sold, so people have ways to back out of a purchase when they realize they cannot pay back the loan. None of this works for drugs. Trying to apply the same logic to drugs would make the the debt problem of medical bills even worse than it already is. It would also lead to a strong inequality in medical care.
- savanaly 10y ago
  Isn't Martin Shkreli notorious for hiking prices on drugs, not for pioneering new payment models for drugs? My post was about how if a company had a drug which it had development cost $X for, it could recoup X + p from the consumer even if the drug is a one time dose rather than an ongoing treatment. How much p profit they make is a separate question and anyways is sort of orthogonal to the question of whether they pay per month or once.
refurb 10y ago
This is what should happen. If you price a drug based on the value it offers, antibiotics should cost a lot more than they do now. You're talking about a single treatment regimen that often saves the patients lives. The problem with that approach is the way that hospitals are reimbursed for antibiotics in the US. There is no room for those prices. I know Congress is trying to change that by making antibiotics separately reimbursed. [Source: I worked at a biotech firm that has a number of antibiotics in development]

xg15 10y ago

Martin Shkreli approves. But to elaborate, aside from the obvious ethical implications, there are also practical differences. You are usually not forced out-of-the-blue to buy a house, no matter if you can afford it or have just bought a house last month. Also, houses can be sold, so people have ways to back out of a purchase when they realize they cannot pay back the loan. None of this works for drugs. Trying to apply the same logic to drugs would make the the debt problem of medical bills even worse than it already is. It would also lead to a strong inequality in medical care.

savanaly 10y ago
Isn't Martin Shkreli notorious for hiking prices on drugs, not for pioneering new payment models for drugs? My post was about how if a company had a drug which it had development cost $X for, it could recoup X + p from the consumer even if the drug is a one time dose rather than an ongoing treatment. How much p profit they make is a separate question and anyways is sort of orthogonal to the question of whether they pay per month or once.

refurb 10y ago

This is what should happen. If you price a drug based on the value it offers, antibiotics should cost a lot more than they do now. You're talking about a single treatment regimen that often saves the patients lives. The problem with that approach is the way that hospitals are reimbursed for antibiotics in the US. There is no room for those prices. I know Congress is trying to change that by making antibiotics separately reimbursed. [Source: I worked at a biotech firm that has a number of antibiotics in development]