3 ms·

> I can't blame a company for trying to make a profit. 10% is a profit. 50% is a profit. Heck even 100% is an understandable profit. You can and should blame t

> I can't blame a company for trying to make a profit. 10% is a profit. 50% is a profit. Heck even 100% is an understandable profit. You can and should blame them for screwing humanity over and above what is reasonable.

viggity 12y ago
No. What screws humanity over is a system where nobody is incentivized to producing new drugs. If it is so effin' easy, you do it. Go ahead. Raise the hundreds of millions of dollars and promise your investors "you know, we're only going to make twice your money back". Its not that simple. I'd rather have the option and have it be expensive as hell than not having the option at all.
- anon1385 12y ago
  Research doesn't have to be funded by investors looking for a profit. Lots of medical research is funded by governments and non-profit organisations. For some diseases that is where the vast majority of funding research comes from.
msandford 12y ago
My dad has worked on pacemakers, defibrillators, left ventricular assist pumps, all kinds of implantables. In this industry they regularly mark up their manufacturing costs 10x-20x because it takes minimum 5-10 years to get something through the FDA. Even if your design is 100% perfect the first time (which they never are). So a $5mm R&D project turns into a $50mm slog through approval and then you get to sell, what a few tends of thousands of units? Let's just say that you could somehow magically sell 50k units. That means you've got to charge $10k per unit just to cover the engineering & approval and stuff and that's before a DIME of profit. So a pacemaker costs $20k not because it's got $15k of raw materials inside of it but because the FDA says that it has to get approved and approval isn't cheap. I'm sure drugs are the same way. It might cost only a few dollars to actually manufacture the ingredients in a pill but the R&D necessary to know WHAT ingredients might have cost $100mm. So even if you sell a million of them they've got to cost $100 each before you take anything else into account. I am not suggesting that it would be OK for the government to basically just take the patents. But it also wouldn't surprise me if they did.
refurb 12y ago
Did you look up what the pharmaceutical industry profit margin is? About 20-30%. Based on that information I'm assuming your OK with the situation now?
EpicEng 12y ago
Where are you getting your numbers? You believe that these companies are making in excess of 100% profit? Also, are you not happy that these drugs exist in the first place?

viggity 12y ago

No. What screws humanity over is a system where nobody is incentivized to producing new drugs. If it is so effin' easy, you do it. Go ahead. Raise the hundreds of millions of dollars and promise your investors "you know, we're only going to make twice your money back". Its not that simple. I'd rather have the option and have it be expensive as hell than not having the option at all.

anon1385 12y ago
Research doesn't have to be funded by investors looking for a profit. Lots of medical research is funded by governments and non-profit organisations. For some diseases that is where the vast majority of funding research comes from.

msandford 12y ago

My dad has worked on pacemakers, defibrillators, left ventricular assist pumps, all kinds of implantables. In this industry they regularly mark up their manufacturing costs 10x-20x because it takes minimum 5-10 years to get something through the FDA. Even if your design is 100% perfect the first time (which they never are). So a $5mm R&D project turns into a $50mm slog through approval and then you get to sell, what a few tends of thousands of units? Let's just say that you could somehow magically sell 50k units. That means you've got to charge $10k per unit just to cover the engineering & approval and stuff and that's before a DIME of profit. So a pacemaker costs $20k not because it's got $15k of raw materials inside of it but because the FDA says that it has to get approved and approval isn't cheap. I'm sure drugs are the same way. It might cost only a few dollars to actually manufacture the ingredients in a pill but the R&D necessary to know WHAT ingredients might have cost $100mm. So even if you sell a million of them they've got to cost $100 each before you take anything else into account. I am not suggesting that it would be OK for the government to basically just take the patents. But it also wouldn't surprise me if they did.

refurb 12y ago

Did you look up what the pharmaceutical industry profit margin is? About 20-30%. Based on that information I'm assuming your OK with the situation now?

EpicEng 12y ago

Where are you getting your numbers? You believe that these companies are making in excess of 100% profit? Also, are you not happy that these drugs exist in the first place?