6 ms·
Goldman Sachs asks: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?'
- vbuwivbiu 8y agothink of all the diseases caused by externalities
- jammygit 8y agoThat's why subscription drugs - pardon, prescription drugs- are so profitable
- forkLding 8y agoYeah but the ethical backlash against being able to cure but not curing will be immense
- tanderson92 8y agoWill it? People die every day in the USA due to lack of access to health care.
- adi-1203 8y agoI do believe that in biotech, you need to truly be motivated by improving lives. It seemed to me that this article mentioned a few strategies that the GS report advised for to sustain revenue growth that could also tie in to making useful biotech products (e.g. finding a market that has a disease with high incidence). That being said, this post title seems to be a tad bit sensationalized. Certainly an investment bank of this ilk would advise towards making profitable investments. My experience has been many people who work in the biotech industry(albeit scientists,engineers, etc) want to help people. Obviously, no company is going to function like a charity but perhaps not all companies are created equally?(when comparing a financial services firm with a biotech company). What I said is not a very nuanced look I suppose, as biotech companies can do things like develop IP from publically funded research and often do things that can be anti-consumer interests.
- londons_explore 8y agoGovernments set the rules of markets... How could governments adjust the rules so that developing cures makes business sense again?
- rayiner 8y agoThe rules of markets are an emergent phenomenon based on human psychology. The government operates within those rules--it can create incentives and disincentives, but it cannot change the rules.
- spanktheuser 8y agoThat’s a rather extraordinary claim. Can you cite evidence to support it?
- FlyingAvatar 8y agoI don't see what is very extraordinary about this claim. The idea of selling of goods predates any government. In their simplest form, how a market operates is determined by the agreement two people, a seller and a buyer for an exchange When restrictions are applied, how the market operates is still determined by how people interact within those rules or by how they attempt to circumvent them to make their exchange.
- sorokod 8y agolike drug dealers and junkies?
- ThalesX 8y agoI'm not sure how to feel about this. I don't have anything backing me up but I do expect there was a clear tribe structure in place before trading really kicked off.
- FlyingAvatar 8y ago
- gilbertmpanga12 8y agoSays Goldman Sachs the money men. Even if there's a prevention model, anomalies are inevitable and what if anomalies are frequent would simply just let those people die because of your profits?
- jnurmine 8y agoWhy not? New patients are born every day.
- jusonchan81 8y agoIf a company succeeds in eliminating or reducing a major illness (and its related family of illnesses) from world wide population then they should be rewarded with a one time cash bonus of what that illness could have cost the governments around the world for the next decade or so. Or some sort of formula like that. One time incentives are always super attractive for employees and staff, although not so much for investors.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- devoply 8y agoYes which is a very good reason that medicine should be a public good as it in Canada and many European countries. The whole premise of for-profit medicine as this article points out is insane.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoYes, European publicly funded medicine works great when R&D is funded by private sector sales to USA consumers. You're welcome!
- bko 8y agoThat's kind of the point of prices. One major factor you consider when setting a price is what's the alternative. If the alternative is 10 years of treatment at $x a year, then you can charge up to 10 * x. You can charge more for convenience of not having to do treatment maybe less to entice this as an alternative
- tonysdg 8y agoOn the flip side, however, I imagine it's a lot harder to convince some entity -- an individual, an insurer, a government -- to pay $1 million once vs. $100,000/year for 10 (or more) years. Whether due to psychology (the former might feel more expensive) or budgeting (the latter lets you spread out the cost), the problem remains. It's going to take a non-trivial amount of effort I think to get the American (and possibly other) healthcare system(s) ready for such a change.
- djcjr 8y agoMarket forces suck at valuing life. Each country has to decide whether to shoulder the responsiblity of citizen health, or leave it to the market.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoOn a personal level we tend to say "life is precious and I value it." or at least those are the virtues we attempt to signal. When we act in concert through markets we tend to say "life is cheap and I don't really care that badly." People always lament and say that the market gets it wrong but does it? Or is the truth about how we really feel just a little too horrifying uncomfortable?
- djcjr 8y agoAs a rule of thumb, consider writing "I" instead of "we".
- james_s_tayler 8y agoI'm actively making a generalization about a behavioral pattern I see playing out among an aggregate of people with regards to what they say with their actions vs. what they say with their words. "I" doesn't make sense in that context. I could change it to "people" but I don't think I'm excluded from the behavioral pattern, so "we" it is.
- ibash 8y agoMore the latter, but it’s a bit more nuanced: It’s more honest to say the each of us values a select few others (for me, maybe a dozen) and everyone else’s life I don’t value.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoThat's a fair comment. Though I would say it's not that you don't value those with a greater psychological distance from you it's that you value them in the abstract and it doesn't concretely translate to materially caring about them.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoPart of this is because the vitriol poured out on Gilead over pricing. The cure had actually much cheaper lifetime costs than the treatment, but because the cost was upfront people complained. How much a society is willing to pay for stuff is a real indication of what it actually values. Society has shown that it does not value cures over treatments. You get what you pay for.
- gumby 8y agoKey factor in a farms pitch deck I wrote years ago: this indication recurs, so patients who catch the disease will need subsequent treatment, but due to how it happens this doesn’t qualify as a chronic condition. (Which would have made the trials much more expensive). There’s a bit of kabuki in pharma pitches: on one hand you have to talk about how you care about patient suffering, on the other hand you need to cosmetically sugar coat yet emphasize the revenue model, which is what people really care about. (Oh and the best pitch decks always have gory pictures in them)
- devoply 8y agoWhatever, don't do it China will. They'll make billions. You'll be pissed. No one will shed a tear.
- sanbor 8y agoIs capitalism a sustainable life model?
- globe1337 8y agoNope.
- antpls 8y agoWhat about governments create a "bug bounty" program for diseases? Every year, the bounties for common diseases would increase, and if a firm finds a cure, it must accept the bounty and gives the cure to the human society, free of royalty
- brenschluss 8y agoThis is a great idea. However - how would you define a partial cure? Or reward improvements to a cure? A cancer drug that works 60% of the time? 80% of the time? Etc.
- zygotic12 8y agoFor fucks sake - it's Goldman Sachs people. When the market was going tits up in 2007/8 they royally shafted all of their own clients. If don't accept the stance that the whole operation is toxic then bye bye dinosaur. (But if you have a shit tonne of cash I recommend them). (added note: I'm pure British (born in Zambia) any sarcasm is intentional and probably just for effect)
- adminu 8y agoWhat if nations funded research and drug production in nation owned facilities that priced the drugs at production price to national insurances and at higher prices for world wide sale? The high costs of research in medicine should be canceled out by the reduction in insurance spending (which no instead would directly be used for research). Given that nowadays drug companies are profitable their spending and earnings must be balanced, so would it would be in such a system as well. The price for drugs can only go down this way. It would not even be necessary to get rid of commercial drug companies and the standing patents. It would just be an addition for the creation of drugs that do not need to rely on a business model but that are focused on actually make people healthy as cheaply as possible.