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I think it's a fallacy to say that pharmaceutical financial interests are not aligned with actually effectively curing diseases. First, when they cure a diseas

I think it's a fallacy to say that pharmaceutical financial interests are not aligned with actually effectively curing diseases. First, when they cure a disease we don't sudenly become immortal, it improves our life quality and expectancy and new diseases become more prevalent at a later stage, so they don't lose their jobs. Second, even if slowing down research could effectively allow them to benefit longer from existing cures, generally you have competitors and inertia tends to not work well in adversarial conditions.

jjk166 6y ago
The argument is that it's more profitable to sell a pill you have to take every day for an extended period of time (or forever) than it is to sell a pill you only have to take once (or a small number of times). Recurring revenue is generally more desirable than a lump sum. There's still a strong incentive to make the disease manageable. It has nothing to do with saving money on research or keeping their jobs.
- satellite2 6y ago
  That's what the second argument answers to. If your competitor produce a one time treatment then he wins the entire market.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    That doesn't logically follow. Why would a one time treatment win the market? Lasik is a one time treatment that certainly hasn't eliminated the market for daily contacts. The ability to buy a house hasn't eliminated the market for renting. The one time treatment has to pay for its development in a single dose, the recurring treatment can amortize its costs over many doses. In general, you will have to pay a premium for the convenience of a single dose, and many people can't justify that cost.
    - gadf 6y ago
      That's a really good point about lasik. Great example thank you. But at the same time I guess it cuts both ways because lasik exists. but what I'm specially worried about is that cures might be designed to not be perfect so that maybe you need to buy them again in 15 years or something just like a light bulb they can make perfect light bulbs but they design them to be obsolete so they can sell more. Why would not the same economics operate in the pharmaceutical industry I think it's a tragedy that it might when they should stick with their hippocratic principles.
gadf 6y ago
The first points are really good one. But the second point lost me because I think you can see there's actually a lot of value to be tapped in technology say by keeping software kind of shit for a long time. You end up with lots of consultants and like there's a lot of inertia in the yenterprise software industry where there's also a lot of money. I don't think that's just because of process. I think some of it is there's profit to me made by artificially holding back innovation because then you can stretch it out over the maximum amount of time through which you can extract value from it. Just like suppressing advanced technologies. in the public example consider like apple they must have super advanced devices that they're working on and we're not going to see them for a while because why would they bring out that generation now when they can still make a good profit from their existing product lines long into the future.

jjk166 6y ago

The argument is that it's more profitable to sell a pill you have to take every day for an extended period of time (or forever) than it is to sell a pill you only have to take once (or a small number of times). Recurring revenue is generally more desirable than a lump sum. There's still a strong incentive to make the disease manageable. It has nothing to do with saving money on research or keeping their jobs.

satellite2 6y ago
That's what the second argument answers to. If your competitor produce a one time treatment then he wins the entire market.
- jjk166 6y ago
  That doesn't logically follow. Why would a one time treatment win the market? Lasik is a one time treatment that certainly hasn't eliminated the market for daily contacts. The ability to buy a house hasn't eliminated the market for renting. The one time treatment has to pay for its development in a single dose, the recurring treatment can amortize its costs over many doses. In general, you will have to pay a premium for the convenience of a single dose, and many people can't justify that cost.
  - gadf 6y ago
    That's a really good point about lasik. Great example thank you. But at the same time I guess it cuts both ways because lasik exists. but what I'm specially worried about is that cures might be designed to not be perfect so that maybe you need to buy them again in 15 years or something just like a light bulb they can make perfect light bulbs but they design them to be obsolete so they can sell more. Why would not the same economics operate in the pharmaceutical industry I think it's a tragedy that it might when they should stick with their hippocratic principles.

gadf 6y ago

The first points are really good one. But the second point lost me because I think you can see there's actually a lot of value to be tapped in technology say by keeping software kind of shit for a long time. You end up with lots of consultants and like there's a lot of inertia in the yenterprise software industry where there's also a lot of money. I don't think that's just because of process. I think some of it is there's profit to me made by artificially holding back innovation because then you can stretch it out over the maximum amount of time through which you can extract value from it. Just like suppressing advanced technologies. in the public example consider like apple they must have super advanced devices that they're working on and we're not going to see them for a while because why would they bring out that generation now when they can still make a good profit from their existing product lines long into the future.