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SoylentNews
posted by
martyb
on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:34AM
from the staying-alive-is-getting-more-expensive dept.
from the staying-alive-is-getting-more-expensive dept.
EpiPen's price has ballooned about 400% since 2008, rising from about a $100 list price to $500 today. The EpiPen is one of the most important life-saving medical innovations for people with severe food allergies—which affect as many as 15 million Americans and 1 in 13 children in the United States. But its price has exploded over the last decade despite few upgrades to the product itself. The product's lack of competitors is likely a significant driver of the costs. [...] [The] EpiPen enjoys a near-monopoly on the market with annual sales of more than $1.3 billion and nearly 90% U.S. market share.
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EpiPen's Price Increased 400% since 2008
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The Official Colorado State Vegetable is now the "state legislator".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jelizondo on Tuesday August 23 2016, @02:46PM
Children, children... read history instead of playing Pokémon...
In an interview [nytimes.com], after the Ann Arbor conference, Murrow asked Salk, "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" Salk magnanimously replied: "Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?"
Not everything should be about profit, particularly not when dealing with human health and life.
No profit on saving lifes? I guess that makes a communist...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @04:16PM
To be fair, the Salk vaccine was just inactivated virus. Could you patent the virus or the formalin-inactivation of the virus?
I'm all for universal healthcare, but patents are useful for drugs with high development costs while we have a for-profit system.
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:58PM
Modern drug development is high risk and high cost. A pharma company may go through dozens of possible drugs until they land one that works and is safe. This means considerable cost to bring a single drug to market. If there's no assurance of at least breaking even (forget about profit for now) no one would take that risk.
It's all well and good to pooh-pooh the evil capitalists and their greed for profit. But the labs need to be furnished. Lights and water kept running. Researchers need to be paid. Studies to be run on the safety and efficacy of drugs. If all of that work and investment can be cancelled out by some generics drug manufacturer on a shoe-string budget a quarter or two after launch, it'll be for nothing. And development costs will only increase as new complex and powerful technologies are introduced. Stem cells, dna editing, who knows what else.
Lastly. There's no need to be condescending by calling everyone children. Can we all act as adults here?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:36PM
Also, without patents companies would rely on drugs being a black box that are protected trade secrets or have increasingly complex formulations to prevent reverse engineering.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday August 23 2016, @08:42PM
There is a powerful argument for state-owned, public-funded medical research. Let the bread heads do the easy less-risky stuff and the rest of us can pull together and look after ourselves.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:42PM
There is a powerful argument for state-owned, public-funded medical research.
And that powerful argument is?
Let the bread heads do the easy less-risky stuff and the rest of us can pull together and look after ourselves.
There is nothing too risky for the private world. There are purely private markets that have risk that makes the medical industry look tame (such as the sea salvage industry or oil well fire fighters). They do just fine without government funding.
I think the real powerful argument here is that government is notorious for coming up with rules and spending that don't reduce risk or make us safer, including the medical industry and medical research, but make everything cost a lot more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jelizondo on Tuesday August 23 2016, @11:55PM
Oh, my god.
You mean as long as it is profitable it is free enterprise and we hate the government; as soon as large loses loom, flip-flop, we love the government and please bail us out.
Please stop watching Fox News, their universe is completely different from the one you and I live in.
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday August 24 2016, @12:20AM
You mean as long as it is profitable it is free enterprise and we hate the government; as soon as large loses loom, flip-flop, we love the government and please bail us out.
You know, you could think. So let's try that. What is the research that is so expensive and so risky, yet still has a huge return on investment to justify public funding rather than private? Sorry, it doesn't exist. Even stuff like space stations or large particle colliders are within the grasp of the private world. Instead, we see the usual squandering of public funds on scientific white elephants, and people with a remarkable willful ignorance of economics.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:53PM
state-owned, public-funded medical research
This, together with GP's on-target use of "Communist", gets top marks from me.
...and isn't most fundamental biological research already being done in public universities?
Biologists and physicians, am I wrong?
...and for those who aren't aware, USA's healthcare costs are the highest[1] on the planet and the results are far from the best.
[1] USAians spend ~3x what Britons do and Cuba (with its minimal monetary resources) bests USA in several ways in quality of outcome--largely through easy access and early intervention.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Tuesday August 23 2016, @11:47PM
Sorry if I caused you offense.
The effect intended was sarcasm together with the fact that I'm usually the oldest person around fora like this. (At Soylent I suspect only Runaway1956 is in my league, maybe a couple of others who might have encountered 80-column cards used in real-life.)
The sarcasm part is due to younger people believing that the “correct” way is the modern may, even if other ways might be possible and even desirable. And even if the results are less than desirable, such as big pharma milking consumers, kids insist on there being only the market as a solution.
When I was young, no thinking bro would defend the status quo and in return we got civil rights, a presidential resignation and good music. Now, it seems to be the opposite, if you are right thinking, then you must defend the Establishment.
Now, I figure I’m ready for disposal, in my previous post I forgot to add: Get off my lawn! :-)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 24 2016, @02:00AM
The largest cost for a new drug is marketing, none of that boring research stuff.
Also if you don't pay to send doctors on junkets, who is going to trick all your customers into buying your 'medicine'?