7 ms·

I've checked and it's € 50 a month in the Netherlands for the pills. There is something else going on with that pricing. There are doctor fees on top of that, b

• dillondoyle 7y ago
  I can confirm in the US it is truly that expensive (which is fucking crazy). I have pretty good insurance (or at least the best I can get self-buying) but I still have to pay 30% of meds costs. That is something like $400 /month. Luckily Gilled will reimburse up to 7500 /year. Fucked up private insurance in US, they charge that much and then do the reimbursement so they can bill the huge monthly cost to plans / government that will cover it. We should be giving this out for free. My MD said Truvada might go generic next year, so perhaps there's hope.
  • malandrew 7y ago
    In the US, we’re paying obscene prices because no other country pays their fair share to recoup the cost of development plus bringing the drug to market plus a reasonable margin for the effort. The US should establish an agreement whereby US patients pay a LOT less but that the foreign patients need to pay the same. The amount the industry earns should be low enough to make it reasonably financially accessible to patients but high enough to prompt our best and our brightest to pursue new drug development as a career.
    • ben_w 7y ago
      Pricing is always and inevitably what the market can bear, not anything about “fairness”. If prices are too high or communities are too poor (communities not countries), those communities go without. Right now, the US is so expensive that in cases like this it makes sense for patients to fly to another country to get the medicine. That’s unsustainable.
      • Nasrudith 7y ago
        It fundamentally is about fairness albeit in a peripheral sense - the market doesn't exist in a vaccuum - those high prices depend upon granted monopoly rights and regimes which are a bargin wrongly conflated with property and treated like an entitlement instead of the contracts they are. Nothing is owned - only the ability to stop others from doing things. An unfair contract is increasingly likely to be ripped up because there is nothing more to be lost by doing so. That people are flying abroad is the start of ripping up their local monopoly along with uncertifified online pharmacy importation and grey market sales - taking risks to avoid costs is a sign that the market /isn't/ bearing it.
      • LargeWu 7y ago
        The reason markets don't really work well for healthcare is that 2 things efficient markets require are competition and symmetrical information. Drug companies have exclusive patents. Doctors require extensive licensing that limits the labor supply. Prices are not transparent from providers. And maybe most importantly, in many cases people don't really have a choice whether they want to participate in the market or not; it's sometimes a choice of "pay whatever they say for treatment" and "die".
    • tonyarkles 7y ago
      > During the quarter [2019 Q2], Gilead generated $2.2 billion in operating cash flow, repaid $500 million of debt, made dividend payout of $800 million and spent $588 million on share buybacks. > Adjusted product gross margin was 87.3% compared with 84.2% in the year-ago period. Research & development (R&D) expenses were relatively flat at $916 million. Selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses increased 20.8% to $1.01 billion. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gilead-gild-q2-earnings-sales-135501117.html?.tsrc=applewf https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gilead-gild-q2-earnings-sales... They’re doing OK, I think.
      • malandrew 7y ago
        You're basing your argument on cherrypicking one single pharmaceutical company that is doing exceptionally well recently because it had the second best selling drug of 2018, Harvoni, a drug to treat Hep C. What about when you take all the pharma companies and average how well they do over several years? The average net profit margin for the industry is 14.05% according to a January 2018 study by New York University’s Stern School of Business. 14.05%, not great, not terrible. In addition, the overwhelming majority of those dividends and share buybacks from one company are subsequently plowed back into the industry in different companies depending on which of those companies are working on the most profitable drugs. source: I have several friends that control a lot of AUM that specialize in pharma investments.
        • rowanG077 7y ago
          14.05% Is FUCKING GREAT considering they make their money over the misery of people. It's actually a disgrace that the profit margin is anything over 2%.
          • malandrew 7y ago
            14.05% is perfectly reasonable considering they are giving people hope for a better quality of life. Profiting off someone's misery would be when you cause the problem and provide the solution. If you merely recognize an existing problem and provide a solution where there previously was none or where the previous solution was inadequate/inferior. Attitudes like yours makes me not want to continue using my talent to create on solutions to problems that qualitatively and quantitatively improve people's lives. If people are going to look at it as profiting off misery and deny me the opportunity to increase my wealth, I and others will just take our talents elsewhere. There is no lack of other industries and problems where those capable of contributing solutions can make money and not be subject to your shitty attitude towards how they make a living. Lastly, I say all this as someone who takes an orphan drug myself that would not exist at all if the US didn't have a legal framework that gives pharmaceutical companies the incentive to bring drugs to market. The drug I take is available in only one other country and only because a US pharmaceutical company brought it to market.
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • StreamBright 7y ago
      You are paying this much because of many reasons non of them is why the rest of the world does not pay its fair share. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/080615/6-reasons-healthcare-so-expensive-us.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08061...
      • Nasrudith 7y ago
        Monosopy doesn't depend upon anything the US does. They have local control of IP even if they tied it to others. There would be costs involved but they can always tell them to get stuffed and manufacture their own if they won't be reasonable. Notably there is a lack of pharmaceutical companies who decide to abandon world markets entirely because positive N is always greater than 0.
        • StreamBright 7y ago
          I mean US produces recently the 57% percent of new drugs. https://media.xconomy.com/wordpress/wp-content/images/2014/09/06183528/Table.png https://media.xconomy.com/wordpress/wp-content/images/2014/0... I am not sure this explains the discrepancy between the healthcare cost between US and Switzerland. More in depth analysis: "There were two causes of this massive increase: government policy and lifestyle changes. First, the United States relies on company-sponsored private health insurance. The government created programs like Medicare and Medicaid to help those without insurance. These programs spurred demand for health care services. That gave providers the ability to raise prices. A Princeton University study found that Americans use the same amount of health care as residents of other nations. They just pay more for them. For example, U.S. hospital prices are 60 percent higher than those in Europe. Government efforts to reform health care and cut costs raised them instead. Second, chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, have increased. They are responsible for 85 percent of health care costs. Almost half of all Americans have at least one of them. They are expensive and difficult to treat. As a result, the sickest 5 percent of the population consume 50 percent of total health care costs. The healthiest 50 percent only consume 3 percent of the nation's health care costs. Most of these patients are Medicare patients. The U.S. medical profession does a heroic job of saving lives. But it comes at a cost. Medicare spending for patients in the last year of life is six times greater than the average. Care for these patients costs one-fourth of the Medicare budget. In their last six months of life, these patients go to the doctor's office 29 times on average. In their last month of life, half go to the emergency room. One-third wind up in the intensive care unit. One fifth undergo surgery. " https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-rising-healthcare-costs-4064878 https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-rising-healthcare-costs... You can read the rest it is very informative. I still don't think that healthcare cost in the US is caused by the rest of the world not paying their fair share in drug discovery.
    • iamnotacrook 7y ago
      It's hard to imagine nowadays for many people, but ignorant, uninformed opinions like the one you just typed were quite rare before the internet; now they're commonplace. You're not supposed to make up stuff to defend your country, nor to parrot some crap someone else said without thinking about it. You're supposed to think about stuff and make at least a little effort to determine whether something is true, or whether someone is putting you on. It would have taken you moments to discovered the answer in this case.
      • ghostwriter 7y ago
        Can you substantiate your rant with facts? The U.S. for decades has been the leading country in drugs r&d and other countries do use the results of it on subsidized terms. https://www.abpi.org.uk/facts-and-figures/science-and-innovation/worldwide-pharmaceutical-company-rd-expenditure-by-country/ https://www.abpi.org.uk/facts-and-figures/science-and-innova...
        • sgift 7y ago
          ABPI - Association of the British pharmaceutical industry. That's not a source, that's propaganda, so we're back to the default: What has been brought up without proof can be dismissed without proof. One reason pharma R&D is higher in the US is that the general costs to bring a product to the US market are far higher than in other countries (e.g. the requirements of the FDA are costlier, see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452302X16300638 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452302X1... )
        • tripzilch 7y ago
          I find this SO hard to believe. It just does not pass the bullshit test, you know? How come the US spends zillions on drug research and then sells that research for pennies to everybody except themselves? I mean the logical conclusion to me, is that the real value of this drug research is in fact much lower than the pharma industry pretends it to be, hence they can't sell it for such insane prices abroad as they can in the US where they control regulation. Also, there is this comment which, if true, illustrates that point perfectly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20582411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20582411
    • stevesimmons 7y ago
      I once presented to the monthly board meeting of one of the biggest global pharma companies. The audience was the top execs plus the top-10 country heads. All they talked about during the dinner was price fixing, tricky deals to block generics, and schemes to maximise the amount they could get each country to pay. Nothing about the science, medicine behind the drugs, or benefits to patients. That's the reality of pharma today.
      • ekianjo 7y ago
        Not just pharma. Most industries care about increasing profits and blocking competitors. Hardly surprising since Top execs are measured on such metrics.
    • 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
      Since when the market knows the word fair? You charge as much as you can, in this case Americans are the suckers, but if it makes you feel any better for yourself and natural pride keep calling it as you pay for the whole worlds market.
    • tripzilch 7y ago
      Oh look you created an incredibly inefficient, expensive and corrupted system to research drugs and now you claim you spend more on drug research than anybody. Have a pat on the back.
• Vrixam 7y ago
  Starting today in NL is a subsidized program for at risk MSM via the GGD. Participants pay 7.50 per 30 pills.
  • wjnc 7y ago
    But that's the payment after co-payment by insurance or third party (in case of GGD the municipality). For a fair comparison I looked up the over the counter price of the generic medicine (or to be fair, public news about that price, I didn't look in the price register). My conclusion is that in the US case it's somewhat unfair to blame the insurer if the base price of a medicine is amplified about 20 times.