3 ms·

afaik the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins. I am skeptical of your claims.

by make3 9y ago

majormajor 9y ago
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223 Profits seem pretty healthy, but R&D spending is also quite high. I'd expect a high-research growth industry to have much higher profit margins than mature things like oil and gas or media. Boggles my mind why banking is comparable, though. :| Believe it or not, I'm not making claims. I'm trying to get people to go deeper on the issue sooner, rather than later, since a lot could change around it in the US in the near future. > And it's not just cancer drugs - between April and June this year, drug company Gilead clocked sales of $3.5bn for its latest blockbuster hepatitis C drug Sovaldi. This sort of thing - breakthrough new drug being ridiculously expensive at first - doesn't seem necessarily bad to me, as long as the price comes down over time and the drugs deliver the goods. We just need to make sure we know the numbers to watch to make sure we don't either bankrupt ourselves, or kill the motivation for research (jacking up the prices of old drugs is a scary recent trend I want us to crack down on). Here's the core thing: "the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins" is not a policy suggestion. "Costs are too high" is not a policy suggestion. They suggest a few possible things - price controls, or higher taxes, come to mind immediately, but don't do anything beyond that. The US is in dire need of useful policy suggestions (even "medicare for all" is pretty thin, and ignores some disadvantages Medicare has compared to a lot of people's current private coverage), and in even more dire need of people who talk about things with more nuance than "socialize it all!" or "individual liberty is the most important thing!"

afaik the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins. I am skeptical of your claims.

by make3 9y ago

afaik the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins. I am skeptical of your claims.

majormajor 9y ago

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223 Profits seem pretty healthy, but R&D spending is also quite high. I'd expect a high-research growth industry to have much higher profit margins than mature things like oil and gas or media. Boggles my mind why banking is comparable, though. :| Believe it or not, I'm not making claims. I'm trying to get people to go deeper on the issue sooner, rather than later, since a lot could change around it in the US in the near future. > And it's not just cancer drugs - between April and June this year, drug company Gilead clocked sales of $3.5bn for its latest blockbuster hepatitis C drug Sovaldi. This sort of thing - breakthrough new drug being ridiculously expensive at first - doesn't seem necessarily bad to me, as long as the price comes down over time and the drugs deliver the goods. We just need to make sure we know the numbers to watch to make sure we don't either bankrupt ourselves, or kill the motivation for research (jacking up the prices of old drugs is a scary recent trend I want us to crack down on). Here's the core thing: "the pharmaceutical industry is one of the industries with the highest profit margins" is not a policy suggestion. "Costs are too high" is not a policy suggestion. They suggest a few possible things - price controls, or higher taxes, come to mind immediately, but don't do anything beyond that. The US is in dire need of useful policy suggestions (even "medicare for all" is pretty thin, and ignores some disadvantages Medicare has compared to a lot of people's current private coverage), and in even more dire need of people who talk about things with more nuance than "socialize it all!" or "individual liberty is the most important thing!"