3 ms·

Other rich countries have price controls. If the US had the same price controls, all else equal, the economics of pharmaceutical research would fall apart. Whet

Other rich countries have price controls. If the US had the same price controls, all else equal, the economics of pharmaceutical research would fall apart. Whether that would be bad or good is certainly up for debate, but my personal view is that it would be bad. But it wouldn't be necessary to leave all else equal, if we introduced the same kind of price controls. The idea I think seems interesting is to do more research funding via large public prizes, rather than primarily grants and profits. Unfortunately it sounds pretty untenable, politically, to me, to set these prizes high enough to encourage a similar amount of research as the profit motive does. It's hard for me to envision a like $3B prize for "create a really good weight loss drug" having been politically feasible, for instance.

blkhawk 2y ago
What price controls other countries have allow for profits that are more than healthy. And I don't think that the economics of pharmaceutical research are all that closely coupled to the prices of drugs in the US. The apparent profit margin of the US parma industry is just too high for that - I have seen 70% cited compared to ~20% in other countries. [Source:https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/research/flow-of-money-through-the-pharmaceutical-distribution-system/ https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/research/flow-of-money-through-...] Lets just think about your 3B weighloss thing leaving out complications like its a spherical cow in a vaccum - there are enough overweight people in the world that if you can sell enough of it to each of them at a 10USD profit in total you easily make that back. Imagine what a 20usd per cured overweight person profit would do. isn't doubling your money enough? And considering that new potentially overweight people are born every day it would be a perpetual (spherical) cash cow.

blkhawk 2y ago

What price controls other countries have allow for profits that are more than healthy. And I don't think that the economics of pharmaceutical research are all that closely coupled to the prices of drugs in the US. The apparent profit margin of the US parma industry is just too high for that - I have seen 70% cited compared to ~20% in other countries. [Source:https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/research/flow-of-money-through-the-pharmaceutical-distribution-system/ https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/research/flow-of-money-through-...] Lets just think about your 3B weighloss thing leaving out complications like its a spherical cow in a vaccum - there are enough overweight people in the world that if you can sell enough of it to each of them at a 10USD profit in total you easily make that back. Imagine what a 20usd per cured overweight person profit would do. isn't doubling your money enough? And considering that new potentially overweight people are born every day it would be a perpetual (spherical) cash cow.