LAWYERS
Great comments and links. I’ll be spending much time going over this info. Also, I shared many of these links with my friend, I do believe it helped him to understand! Thanks to all!
It depends on the drug. As others have noted, the cost of failed pharmaceuticals has to be paid by the sale of successful ones. It is a business.
Also note that some drugs are just expensive as hell to manufacture. Low molecular weight heparin comes to mind. It’s an expensive process. Other drugs require rare and expensive ingredients that aren’t readily available.
Typically though, the more people that need the drug, the cheaper it will be. Drugs for rare diseases can run into the tens of thousands of dollar per month. Advertising actually helps lower the cost of pharmaceuticals per scrip because supply and demand is very much a reality in the pharm world. The more people that buy it, the more spread out the non-production costs become.
Also, generics aren’t the godsend some people think. The availability of generic after a period of time just means that drug companies have to charge more to make their profit before other drug companies are free to make it and sell it.
One day we got a letter from a patient's mom. The patient had contracted cytomegalovirus (CMV) pneumonia and was in a terminal coma. His doctors had given him maybe 36 hours to live. They (the doctors) got permission to try one of our drugs on a compassionate use basis (If I remember, it was still only in Phase II clinical trials at the time).
The upshot was they infused the drug, the patient recovered, and six weeks later had gained back thirty pounds and had returned to work. Our drug almost literally brought him back from the dead.
Here's another (different drug this time);
We got a letter from a man who had been bedridden for years with arthritis. His doctor prescribed our new drug (had just been FDA approved). He said that within three days he was up and around and cook his own meals. (Think about that for a minute.)
One further rant:
If people think drug companies are making obscene profits, they should try starting one themselves. Either they could get very rich, or they could make drugs dirt cheap. But one notices, they don't.
Lack of competition. Business competition against the political/regulator class is illegal.
I work in the industry.
One big pharma has, say 35 compounds in development at any given time, of their own. A drug is an FDA approved compound, you follow. A compound is just a chemical or antibody that is about to undergo FDA approval.
These compounds are aimed at diseases that a) have the greatest number of afflicted people in the key market, which is the United States, and only the United States, and b) has a ‘method of action’ that is patentable, and thus sellable.
Here’s the thing - in order to sell your drug, you have to undergo the four phases of the FDA approval process. To get through that process, it will cost - on average - about $900MM to $1.3BB.
This does not count the introduction of the compound as a therapy or cure in a market that is not governed by such onerous regulation. Central Europe, Mexico, some Asian countries. They will evaluate it there before ever considering putting the compound through the FDA process.
Now, if a big pharma gets one blockbuster drug approved every other year, they will just clean up. The reason why is the chances of passing all four stages of the FDA process is pretty freaking small.
Each of the 35 compounds in this fictional company is its own little company. To determine the annual profitability of the big pharma, the management looks at each compound, evaluates competing compounds with different methods of action under development at rival firms, sizes up the chances of the compound being effective, and if they have doubts, they’ll just whack that drug in mid-development.
They do this because the revenue window for any blockbuster is 10 years, and only 10 years. To make matters worse, the rest of the world operates what is called a monopsony - the revese of a monopoly. Europe pools all of its buyers together and places one big order.
The US is the reverse, all their buyers buy on their own. This makes the US the only, the single, market in which a drug manufacturer, for only 10 years, can recover not just the cost of development, but the cost of the other 34 compounds still under development.
That’s right - typically it is one, or maybe two, drugs that are propping up a big pharma firm.
When the Army handed the blueprint for the anti-Aids therapy AZT to I forget who, they still had to pay the $550MM to go through the FDA ringer.
So, your $500 pill is subsidizing not just the rest of the compounds under development at the company the drug came from. No, you are also SUBSIDIZING the ability for the rest of the world to buy that very same pill for 1000’s of percent less than what you would pay.
Canada, for example, places one giant order for a big blockbuster drug. Every hospital gets their order from the Canadian government. This is why the assholes who live in WA and MI - gigantic bleeding ass liberals that they are - pop over the border to buy their drugs for way less over in Canada.
Now, just to make this a little worse, there are the drugs that are KNOWN TO BE EFFECTIVE AGAINST BROAD SPECTRUM OF CANCERS AND VIRUSES, yet are not available because the drug is ‘public domain’ - as a compound, it can’t be patented. It’s therapeutic usage can be patented, but those patents are very weak, and defeated relatively easily in court.
As such, the drug DCA will NEVER BE AVAILABLE TO YOU, EVEN THOUGH IT KILLS A TON OF DIFFERENT CANCERS. Nobody is going to put up the $500 to $900 to get it through the FDA process when you can’t recover that cost in the open market.
So, consider all the people in your family that were killed by cancer in the last five years, and then look up DCA and find out about which cancers it has been demonstrated to be effective against, and which not.
“Awww, that’s BS. How do they know that this drug is effective against cancers and lots of different viruses, when no FDA studies have been done?”
Well, lots of studies have been done, and because of the ‘method of action’ of this drug, it takes a very simple and radical approach to killing the cancer.
Every cell in your body has the ability to undergo what is called apoptosis, or ‘cell suicide’. When a cell’s RNA is compromised, a chemical signal goes out to the bit in the cell that causes the cell to kill itself. Cancers and viruses like Hemhorragic Fever have developed an ability to cut off that chemical signal prior to the cell killing itself.
This turns the cell into a manufacturing plant for more viruses or cancer cells.
DCA restores the ability of the cell to kill itself, stopping the metastasis of the cancer, or the spreading of the virus, before it can begin.
You will never be able to buy this drug as it stands today. You can go to other countries and obtain the therapy there, but never in the USA.
So, there you go. Any questions?
They'll be replaced by those with little or no insurance, little or no retirement pensions, and no employment medical benefits.
Few will ever be able to afford heathcare, let alone all these expensive big pharma medications.
Liability and government regulations add a lot to the overhead. Huge payouts for unforeseen side effects are a very real possibility.
Non recognition of intellectual property rights in Canada, China and India means that the bulk of the cost for developing innovative new medicines is born by the American consumer.