Comments

1

From a political standpoint, focus on drug manufacturing was a missed opportunity for the Left this year, although I'm sure Biden will take a few potshots at some easy targets. There was way too much focus on single payer, as if there is a consensus in the world as to how to provide health insurance. There clearly isn't, given the wide variety of methods in which countries achieve "universal health care" (which isn't always universal).

In contrast, drugs are pretty simple. Someone creates a formula, someone else makes the drug, doctors and nurses prescribe them. What you just wrote simply strengthens the case: drug formulas should be public domain. At most, you pay companies when they develop something unusual and highly useful. Otherwise, you simply pay people to develop drugs. Once the drug is created, companies make them, the way they make aspirin. Problems can occur at this level as well, which is why the government should also be in the business of being the drug maker of last resort. That might seem like overkill unless you knew about the insanely high prices paid for insulin (fucking insulin!) last year.

The drug business would change dramatically. There would no longer be an incentive to market drugs. So that means that the 20 billion or so spent sending doctors and nurses to exotic locales or otherwise convincing them of the greatness of a new drug (that is remarkably similar to the old drug) would simply go away. The 6 billion spent marketing the drugs to consumers (ask your doctor about ...) would also go away. All those marketing people would shift to selling something else (perhaps soda pop -- I've heard Pepsi Cola is tasty).

That means that at worst, those lobbying efforts are aimed towards the government. If private companies want to continue to develop drugs, then they can, but at the end of the day, they have to convince a government agency that the drug they developed is actually worthwhile. This could easily lead to corruption, but an independent agency would reduce the risk. It is nothing like the widespread corruption found in the private drug industry, or for that matter, lobbyists who try hard to keep it that way.

The point is, unlike health insurance, drugs aren't that complicated. They are an intellectual commodity, much like software. But as any nerd knows, the world runs on free software (mostly Unix based). Of course, that is another issue. All government software should be open source, which would mean that the ObamaCare website launch debacle simply wouldn't have happened (and the government would have likely saved a couple billion).

2

When New York hit 10,000 cases in one day it went on full lock down. When Florida hit 10,000 cases in one day, it opened Disney World.

4

If you can’t get in to see a doctor or afford one in the first place drug prices are irrelevant.

5

@1 - drugs are actually pretty darned complicated. the vast vast majority of things that look good in preliminary lab experiments and even the initial animal studies crash and burn for one reason or another. There is a reason that university scientists or Federal employees at the NIH are not the ones who take drugs all the way through the required testing & on to approval. They don't (and never have, and never will) have the resources to do it.

You may not like a lot of what pharma companies do. I don't either. Tweaking drugs a tiny bit to extend the patent life with no real difference in efficacy is one. Spending way to much money on marketing is another. And Martin Shkreli should be hung up by the balls and slowly burned to death. But he and his kind are not representative of most companies developing drugs.

But the development process is so long and so complex that there is no way its going to happen without a profit motive. Next time you meet a pharma or biotech person in charge of drug development or applications for FDA approval, ask them about how many thousands of pages of data they have to submit in the application. And how much it cost to generate that data.

There's just no way that a "government-funded scientist" (most of whom are actually at universities, and one of which i used to be) can carry the load of getting a drug approved. In your proposal, where we "just pay people to develop drugs," the taxpayer would be forking out hundreds of billions of dollars a year for all of this, and getting nothing back for most of the failed drugs.

Now, what about your suggestion that all drug formulas be public and everyone be allowed to make them? That would be the end of anyone being willing to take on development. The current system gives you exclusivity for a limited (and relatively short) time period, after which anyone can produce a generic version. And that is not quite as simple as buying an Acme drug factory kit and cranking out the pills. You have to demonstrate to the FDA that your version is equivalent. That too is expensive. There's no free lunch here.

6

Uh, I’m pretty sure Disney shut down in Hong Kong because the authorities there made them do it, not because they value lives there more than in America. Disney values money more than any lives anywhere.

What is indisputably true, however, is that Floridian officials don’t give a fuck about Floridian lives.

8

"What all of this shows is how cheap American life is to corporations and the party entirely devoted to their interests, the GOP." --@Chas

"I couldn't help but smile at all the folks paying inflated prices for drugs so I could get drunk and laid!" @MR.b

And so it goes.

10

Restore the Right to Infect/Inflict, McBikey?
Isn't that (already) the Repub/Corps
approach to the 2nd Amendment?

The Death
Toll is gonna
SKYROCKET
should Repubs
get their evil Ways.

A small price to Pay
for fascism. I suppose.

11

Herd immunity's gonna need
300,000,000 inflicted
with a Death Toll of
TWO % equals
SIX MILLIONS.
DEAD.

I know, I know, they're
Just Human Beings
to be Harvested for
Corporate Profiteering.

13

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fj6hgv6m78


Please wait...

and remember to be decent to everyone
all of the time.

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.