11 ms·

"Well, one pharma company has the patent, and we need to let them charge what they think the market will bear. Sorry LPLD carriers, you have to die now." Appare

"Well, one pharma company has the patent, and we need to let them charge what they think the market will bear. Sorry LPLD carriers, you have to die now." Apparently, this is the best the world can manage in 2018.

miguelrochefort 8y ago
I don't understand how anyone can think patents are a good idea.
- jmcgough 8y ago
  Not a fan of it either, but how do we incentivize companies to research and create new drugs if they can't make back the huge cost of clinical trials?
  - carbocation 8y ago
    What if governments paid for the clinical trials?
    - NikolaeVarius 8y ago
      The article has a section that talks about the difficulty of getting the drug even approved for testing by governments in the first place.
    - sneak 8y ago
      The government is the whole reason the clinical trials are required before patients can be treated with a working drug. They are the cause of the problem, not the solution.
    - longerthoughts 8y ago
      The government does frequently fund the discovery of new drugs. The problem is that the return on that investment is usually abysmal and the taxpayer ends up not only paying to fund the drug’s discovery, but also paying absurdly high prices to buy it from pharmaceutical companies who passed some or all of their risk onto taxpayers. One example: https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651 https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651
      - carbocation 8y ago
        Of course. Most of basic science in the US is government funded. I'm wondering what the OP thinks about removing the barrier that they identified (private corps paying for the trial vs gov paying for the trial) and how that would affect their thinking.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        If you read the article, the drug was in fact discovered at UBC, which is a publicly funded university. But it turns out that discovering the drug wasn't the expensive part. The expensive part was privately funded.
  - latch 8y ago
    Did you read the article? The company that charged that absurd price acquired the patent, they had nothing to do with developing it.
    - mabbo 8y ago
      While I don't disagree with your point, the company that bought the patent paid a lot of money for it from the company that developed it. Patents being exchangeable is not necessarily a bad thing.
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    How do you incentivize environmental research? How are we supposed to find solutions to climate change if they can't be patented? Copyrights are just as bad as patents, and musicians/writers shouldn't make people pay for their music/books. We should start giving money to causes we support, whether it's art, medical research, software projects, etc. It's a mistake to think we should only give money if we're forced to by law (through pricing something that's not scarce).
- worldsayshi 8y ago
  There should at the very least be a law that states that a patented technology should be made available in reasonable ways to make the patent valid.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    Would you rather have this drug exist and be patented, or never have existed at all?
    - zaptheimpaler 8y ago
      I see you arguing that things went just the way they should have all over this thread. This point in particular is completely wrong. The two doctors who made the drug do not even hold the patent and basically gave it away for free to the company trying to distribute it. So yes, if not for the patent this drug would definitely still exist, and probably be available to people who actually freaking need it.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        > I see you arguing that things went just the way they should have all over this thread. Actually, I never said that anywhere. I think what happened is basically a no-op. Without a profit motive, the drug would never have been developed, and therefore not available to anyone, and we'd be in the same boat we're in anyway. What I do think is one of two things should happen: Either (1) we decide that the drug is worth it, in which case health systems should pay the owner of this drug fairly for their investment. Or (2) it's not worth it, in which case we're no worse off than we would have been without this company, other than the fact that they wasted a bunch of their money. (As an aside, note that I said we should pay the owner, fairly for their invention, not the original developer who voluntarily gave up the rights. This is an important distinction as the ability to voluntarily transfer property rights is pretty central to the whole concept. Imagine if after you bought a car, anyone could take it, because you're not the original manufacturer. It's not hard to see the path from this society to one where nobody bothers making cars.) > The two doctors who made the drug do not even hold the patent and basically gave it away for free to the company trying to distribute it. Those two doctors did the least expensive part of the whole operation. The more expensive part was funded privately. If you want to fix this you can either have the government fund that expensive part, or you can have it done privately and pay the owners what they want. > if not for the patent this drug would definitely still exist, and probably be available to people who actually freaking need it Sure, maybe the doctors still would have done the research, but there would be no money either for the clinical trials, and so manufacturing and distributing the drug would be illegal.
- charlesism 8y ago
  I don't have a problem with the idea of patents. I just think we could be a whole lot more pragmatic about them. They're supposed to incentivize useful behavior.
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    Who should decide what's a useful behavior? What's a fair price? What's a reasonable lroduction/distribution strategy? I think the free market should decide, not the government and its enforced monopolies.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Reading the article has convinced me that drug patents in particular are a great idea. Isn't it wonderful that we live in a world where futuristic new treatments like this can be developed? Yes it's true that people can't get the drug now, but at least someday it might be available. Without patents, who would you find to work for free developing something like this?
  - miguelrochefort 8y ago
    > Isn't it wonderful that we live in a world where futuristic new treatments like this can be developed? This futuristic new treatment can no longer be developed or produced by ANYONE in the world, without the consent of this company. Before the patent, anyone could. Do you think that's not a problem? We'll incentivize researchers the same way we'll do with musicians and writers in a post-copyright society. People who think this disease is important will crowdfund the research, and those who want to receive experimental and personalized treatment will pay for it. How do you think we should incentivize things like environmental research? Is our knowledge about climate change patentable? What if someone found a cure?
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      > Before the patent, anyone could Anyone could, but nobody did, or would have without either a profit motive or massive state funding. > Do you think that's not a problem? Well it’s certainly not the most ideal thing you can imagine, but I don’t see a better way in a capitalist society to incentivize medical research. Do you? > People who think this disease is important will crowdfund the research I’m not aware of any crowdfunding campaign that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. > How do you think we should incentivize things like environmental research? It should be funded by the state > What if someone found a cure? That’d be awesome. We should pay them incredibly handsomely for their work.
cratermoon 8y ago
Late-stage capitalism in a nutshell.
lisper 8y ago
The last sentence of the article sums it up pretty well: "If it's not commercially viable to produce a certain therapy, unfortunately, in our Western society, it does not happen." And it is far from clear that this is not as it should be, because it's not just LPLD carriers about whom tear-terking stories can be told. $1M can be deployed in other ways that could potentially save more lives. Instead of "Sorry LPLD carriers, you have to die now", it might be, "Sorry, 100 poor African children without access to clean water, you have to continue to die of dysentery so we can save this one LPLD carrier."
- thomastjeffery 8y ago
  Except $1 millon is not the entire economy. It's easy to hide resources by equating them to their monetary value. The fact is that there exist many millions of dollars, and the way each dollar is spent does not determine the way another dollar is spent.
  - lisper 8y ago
    So what? Dollars are still proxies for finite resources, and there are only three possible ways to procure them: their owners can give them voluntarily, they can be forcibly seized by the government through taxation, or the government can print them, which produces inflation and effectively seizes a little bit from everyone who holds dollars (essentially a tax on savings). If you can't get someone to voluntarily spend $1M to save a life, which of the other two processes do you propose to use?
  - tptacek 8y ago
    This isn't complicated. Say there are 1,000 LPLD patients in North America (a wild overestimate). Then treating them with this therapy costs us $1Bn. If we limit ourselves to health care problems, is $1Bn better spent on these 1,000 LPLD patients, or on increasing penetration of existing therapies for other conditions? It seems likely to be the latter. To believe LPLD therapy objectively deserves the allocation you're talking about, you have to believe that there aren't other cohorts of patients that are currently underserved. But we know that isn't true.
- 8y ago

miguelrochefort 8y ago

I don't understand how anyone can think patents are a good idea.

jmcgough 8y ago
Not a fan of it either, but how do we incentivize companies to research and create new drugs if they can't make back the huge cost of clinical trials?
- carbocation 8y ago
  What if governments paid for the clinical trials?
  - NikolaeVarius 8y ago
    The article has a section that talks about the difficulty of getting the drug even approved for testing by governments in the first place.
  - sneak 8y ago
    The government is the whole reason the clinical trials are required before patients can be treated with a working drug. They are the cause of the problem, not the solution.
  - longerthoughts 8y ago
    The government does frequently fund the discovery of new drugs. The problem is that the return on that investment is usually abysmal and the taxpayer ends up not only paying to fund the drug’s discovery, but also paying absurdly high prices to buy it from pharmaceutical companies who passed some or all of their risk onto taxpayers. One example: https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651 https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651
    - carbocation 8y ago
      Of course. Most of basic science in the US is government funded. I'm wondering what the OP thinks about removing the barrier that they identified (private corps paying for the trial vs gov paying for the trial) and how that would affect their thinking.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      If you read the article, the drug was in fact discovered at UBC, which is a publicly funded university. But it turns out that discovering the drug wasn't the expensive part. The expensive part was privately funded.
- latch 8y ago
  Did you read the article? The company that charged that absurd price acquired the patent, they had nothing to do with developing it.
  - mabbo 8y ago
    While I don't disagree with your point, the company that bought the patent paid a lot of money for it from the company that developed it. Patents being exchangeable is not necessarily a bad thing.
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  How do you incentivize environmental research? How are we supposed to find solutions to climate change if they can't be patented? Copyrights are just as bad as patents, and musicians/writers shouldn't make people pay for their music/books. We should start giving money to causes we support, whether it's art, medical research, software projects, etc. It's a mistake to think we should only give money if we're forced to by law (through pricing something that's not scarce).
worldsayshi 8y ago
There should at the very least be a law that states that a patented technology should be made available in reasonable ways to make the patent valid.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Would you rather have this drug exist and be patented, or never have existed at all?
  - zaptheimpaler 8y ago
    I see you arguing that things went just the way they should have all over this thread. This point in particular is completely wrong. The two doctors who made the drug do not even hold the patent and basically gave it away for free to the company trying to distribute it. So yes, if not for the patent this drug would definitely still exist, and probably be available to people who actually freaking need it.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      > I see you arguing that things went just the way they should have all over this thread. Actually, I never said that anywhere. I think what happened is basically a no-op. Without a profit motive, the drug would never have been developed, and therefore not available to anyone, and we'd be in the same boat we're in anyway. What I do think is one of two things should happen: Either (1) we decide that the drug is worth it, in which case health systems should pay the owner of this drug fairly for their investment. Or (2) it's not worth it, in which case we're no worse off than we would have been without this company, other than the fact that they wasted a bunch of their money. (As an aside, note that I said we should pay the owner, fairly for their invention, not the original developer who voluntarily gave up the rights. This is an important distinction as the ability to voluntarily transfer property rights is pretty central to the whole concept. Imagine if after you bought a car, anyone could take it, because you're not the original manufacturer. It's not hard to see the path from this society to one where nobody bothers making cars.) > The two doctors who made the drug do not even hold the patent and basically gave it away for free to the company trying to distribute it. Those two doctors did the least expensive part of the whole operation. The more expensive part was funded privately. If you want to fix this you can either have the government fund that expensive part, or you can have it done privately and pay the owners what they want. > if not for the patent this drug would definitely still exist, and probably be available to people who actually freaking need it Sure, maybe the doctors still would have done the research, but there would be no money either for the clinical trials, and so manufacturing and distributing the drug would be illegal.
charlesism 8y ago
I don't have a problem with the idea of patents. I just think we could be a whole lot more pragmatic about them. They're supposed to incentivize useful behavior.
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Who should decide what's a useful behavior? What's a fair price? What's a reasonable lroduction/distribution strategy? I think the free market should decide, not the government and its enforced monopolies.
umanwizard 8y ago
Reading the article has convinced me that drug patents in particular are a great idea. Isn't it wonderful that we live in a world where futuristic new treatments like this can be developed? Yes it's true that people can't get the drug now, but at least someday it might be available. Without patents, who would you find to work for free developing something like this?
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  > Isn't it wonderful that we live in a world where futuristic new treatments like this can be developed? This futuristic new treatment can no longer be developed or produced by ANYONE in the world, without the consent of this company. Before the patent, anyone could. Do you think that's not a problem? We'll incentivize researchers the same way we'll do with musicians and writers in a post-copyright society. People who think this disease is important will crowdfund the research, and those who want to receive experimental and personalized treatment will pay for it. How do you think we should incentivize things like environmental research? Is our knowledge about climate change patentable? What if someone found a cure?
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    > Before the patent, anyone could Anyone could, but nobody did, or would have without either a profit motive or massive state funding. > Do you think that's not a problem? Well it’s certainly not the most ideal thing you can imagine, but I don’t see a better way in a capitalist society to incentivize medical research. Do you? > People who think this disease is important will crowdfund the research I’m not aware of any crowdfunding campaign that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. > How do you think we should incentivize things like environmental research? It should be funded by the state > What if someone found a cure? That’d be awesome. We should pay them incredibly handsomely for their work.

cratermoon 8y ago

Late-stage capitalism in a nutshell.

lisper 8y ago

The last sentence of the article sums it up pretty well: "If it's not commercially viable to produce a certain therapy, unfortunately, in our Western society, it does not happen." And it is far from clear that this is not as it should be, because it's not just LPLD carriers about whom tear-terking stories can be told. $1M can be deployed in other ways that could potentially save more lives. Instead of "Sorry LPLD carriers, you have to die now", it might be, "Sorry, 100 poor African children without access to clean water, you have to continue to die of dysentery so we can save this one LPLD carrier."

thomastjeffery 8y ago
Except $1 millon is not the entire economy. It's easy to hide resources by equating them to their monetary value. The fact is that there exist many millions of dollars, and the way each dollar is spent does not determine the way another dollar is spent.
- lisper 8y ago
  So what? Dollars are still proxies for finite resources, and there are only three possible ways to procure them: their owners can give them voluntarily, they can be forcibly seized by the government through taxation, or the government can print them, which produces inflation and effectively seizes a little bit from everyone who holds dollars (essentially a tax on savings). If you can't get someone to voluntarily spend $1M to save a life, which of the other two processes do you propose to use?
- tptacek 8y ago
  This isn't complicated. Say there are 1,000 LPLD patients in North America (a wild overestimate). Then treating them with this therapy costs us $1Bn. If we limit ourselves to health care problems, is $1Bn better spent on these 1,000 LPLD patients, or on increasing penetration of existing therapies for other conditions? It seems likely to be the latter. To believe LPLD therapy objectively deserves the allocation you're talking about, you have to believe that there aren't other cohorts of patients that are currently underserved. But we know that isn't true.
8y ago