Sick of Big Pharma’s pricing, health insurers pledge $55M for cheap generics
Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies partner with Civica to make cheaper generics.
arstechnica.com
Taking down big pharma?
- Thread starter johnbryanpeters
- Start date
arstechnica.com
i wish i knew what generic med my brother tried for his youngest kids aspergers that had him hearing voices....Sick of Big Pharma’s pricing, health insurers pledge $55M for cheap generics
Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies partner with Civica to make cheaper generics.
better to be skinny than hearing voices i guess...
How much is your life worth? An exploration of free market dying
mavenroundtable.io
WSJ: Gene Therapy That Causes Hemophilia Remission To Be Priced At $2-$3M
BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. is seeking millions of dollars for its new hemophilia gene therapy treatment.
mavenroundtable.io
Blood sucking bastards.
Guessing he would have gotten 10 X the sentence if he was found on the corner selling
www.yahoo.com
Ex-pharma CEO gets over 2 years in prison for bribery scheme
The former head of a drug company was sentenced Wednesday to two and a half years in federal prison in a bribery and kickbacks scheme that prosecutors say helped fuel the opioid crisis. Michael Babich, a Scottsdale, Arizona, resident who was CEO of Insys Therapeutics, was sentenced Wednesday in...
www.yahoo.com
maybe they can squeeze 10 years worth of prison sex in two....Guessing he would have gotten 10 X the sentence if he was found on the corner selling
Ex-pharma CEO gets over 2 years in prison for bribery scheme
The former head of a drug company was sentenced Wednesday to two and a half years in federal prison in a bribery and kickbacks scheme that prosecutors say helped fuel the opioid crisis. Michael Babich, a Scottsdale, Arizona, resident who was CEO of Insys Therapeutics, was sentenced Wednesday in...
I just got a prescription for Belsomra sleeping tablets, here they are $60AU for 30 tablets with no concessions from the gov, in the US they are over $300, I don't understand how that works.
here we have free market capitalism duh
I know Kaiser sells generic drugs to their members, keeps the ridiculous costs way down.Sick of Big Pharma’s pricing, health insurers pledge $55M for cheap generics
Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies partner with Civica to make cheaper generics.
Sure have! Whats your point?
My brother in law is a director for Bayer pharmaceuticals making drugs specifically for Hemophiliacs. The overall costs to manufacture their particular drug is expensive as they grow live cultures. Every time a batch is complete all the equipment must be sterilized for the next batch. On occasion, someone fucks up causing the current batch to become contaminated and they have to dump the whole thing (it can take several months to get that particular equipment ready to produce again, its not like a few day process) plus the time it takes to regrow everything. That F up can cost the company up to $18M a pop. The R&D that goes into developing a drug in the US is huge, the years of tests, along with waiting for FDA approval can cost in the $100M's. I believe a company has to wait several years before they can produce a generic version of the drug. The draw back for the original manufacture is they went through the whole process to develop the drug and another company comes in and reaps the benefits. IMO I think one reason for our outrageous drug prices is everyone in the US is sue happy. Look at all the TV ads going after the drug manufactures for these $100m+ lawsuits. I don't think other countries go through that, do they?How much is your life worth? An exploration of free market dying
WSJ: Gene Therapy That Causes Hemophilia Remission To Be Priced At $2-$3M
BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. is seeking millions of dollars for its new hemophilia gene therapy treatment.
Too many people with their hands in the cookie jar...but...jerbs!
Why do I get bills from 5 different organizations when I go to ONE freaking place to get a medical procedure done?
Which is a good reason why they should be non-profit.
Maximizing short term profits demanded by investors on today's markets and providing affordable drugs at low cost constitute a solid conflict of interest. As most americans are invested thanks to their pension portfolios, there is little motivation to do anything about status quo until you get sick.
people don't grasp how astronomically expensive it is to R&D a new drug and bring it to market with FDA approval (and that doesn't count all the other development for drugs that will never make it to market). generics don't have that same R&D expense. they're just reverse engineering the drugs.
Fun fact: Pricing is not set by cost. Prices are set to maximize profits, it is a pretty simple algorithm.
The cost to manufacture epipens and insulin has not increased massively but the price has.
Hell the price of epipens went up because the manufacturer wanted to maximize profits before a generic hit the market.
cost is a factor in pricing. the more it costs to develop & produce, the higher the pricing is gonna be by default.
Only in the case when there is no alternative or competition. Or in the case where the only alternative is death.
In the same model, there is also no motivation to reduce cost.
so when there is a competitive product they'll price it below cost?
Sometimes yes. I've spent a good chunk of my career doing pricing strategy, it is complicated but sometimes you take a loss if it supports a larger business strategy. But generally speaking you just stop making that product if that is the case.
When you have a product that has no competitors, you set the price as high as possible until consumers decide not having any solution is preferable. But if your only alternative is death the consumers acceptable price is whatever they have.
pharma and biologics don't follow the normal consumer pricing strategies.
i'm not saying the costs of drugs isn't a problem, the point i'm trying to convey is that sometimes they expensive because they are expensive. the epipen example mentioned doesn't apply here; there's no reason the costs of those should be as high as they are, and increasing.
Exactly. There is way more failure when developing a drug than success. It can take 5-10 years to develop a drug before getting it FDA approved costing hundreds of millions. It still may fail FDA, then back to the beginning. Again, I think companies are charging more waiting for the next class action suit to occur, cause its the American way.
I'm not denying something has to be done about about the outrageous pricing, but few look at what the costs are to make all of this happen.
Yes, developing drugs is expensive and everything I described is just a symptom of free markets. But here is the rub, the federal government pays for a significant portion of that development. From what I could find "western" pharma companies spend about 95 billion a year in development, I couldn't find what percentage of that actually occurs in the US. The NIH funds about 35 billion a year. That is a significant portion. In return the NIH gets rights to use patents it funded in further research but gets no licensing fees that would be normal. About 10% of all new medications are derived directly from publicly funded patents and about 50% of new medication use some advances that were the result of publicly funded research.
We don't have socialized medicine, but we do have socialized corporate profits.
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Pharma companies also spend a lot more money on sales and marketing than they do on R&D. I have never heard anyone defend drug prices because those superbowl ads are really expensive.
One could argue that from a business perspective that the marketing is necessary. But my doctor should be telling me what drugs I need, not my TV. And my doctor should be prescribing me the right drugs based on data and not because he got an all expenses paid golf trip to Maui.
One could argue that from a business perspective that the marketing is necessary. But my doctor should be telling me what drugs I need, not my TV. And my doctor should be prescribing me the right drugs based on data and not because he got an all expenses paid golf trip to Maui.
This. Even after all the years I've been relocated in Freedumland prescription drug ads still amaze me.
I watched some concussion ball games last weekend. About a third of all the ads were for scrips. They all had annoying music and people in psychotically good moods enthusiastically doing mundane things.
if there's anybody less corrupt than your big pharma boogieman, it's the insurance companies. You know you'll pay the same, right? BCBS is going to pay less, but you'll pay the same.Sick of Big Pharma’s pricing, health insurers pledge $55M for cheap generics
Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies partner with Civica to make cheaper generics.
2-3m for a cure vs 25m over the lifetime of a patient afflicted with the disease.How much is your life worth? An exploration of free market dying
WSJ: Gene Therapy That Causes Hemophilia Remission To Be Priced At $2-$3M
BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. is seeking millions of dollars for its new hemophilia gene therapy treatment.
You people always clamor for a cure for cancer. "Why are there all these treatments? Why isn't there a cure? It must be Joe Biden keeping it a secret!" I can only imagine how much you'd FLIP THE FUCK OUT if a cure for cancer was discovered, and it cost $4m.
WRONG
Do Biopharma Companies Really Spend More on Marketing Than R&D?
As the drug pricing debate on Capitol Hill continues, the debate over how biopharma companies spend also continues, though perhaps more quietly. @
www.raps.org
RIGHT
it costs between 1 and 3 BILLION dollars to bring a single drug to market.
That's just wrong. Are there any facts or references to back this statement up?
Of the 15 companies I have worked for in Biotech, exactly 1 has used NIH based research. And that was licensed appropriately with whatever the fee was plus whatever the percentage of the drug, which will likely never make it market, getting kicked back to the guy who discovered it, via the NIH.
Yes, I realize that I am several beers deep and am yelling in an echo chamber, but why the fuck won't people listen? There are absolutely evil-doers out there, pharma bros and doctor bribers, but biotech is an industry just like any other. I don't get how the predatory practices of transportation, investment, software, or anything else are somehow evil in new drug discovery, but just fine everywhere else
NIH Intellectual Property Policy
https://grants.nih.gov/policy/intell-property.htm
(This may not cover all the bases. It says that NIH funded researchers are compelled to patent, and notify the NIH. I assume the patent is held by the funded researcher. I see in other sources that the NIH may incur a 1.5% license fee for use of patents it holds. Not sure what the difference between a funded patent and a NIH owned patent. Either way considering R&D costs are closer to 15% of sales, 1.5% is off by an order of magnitude)
NIH budget
NIH contributions to new meds
Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016
This report shows that NIH funding contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016. Collectively, this research involved >200,000 years of grant funding totaling more than $100 billion. The analysis...
www.pnas.org
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So there is some abiguity in what is classified as marketing costs. The numbers I was looking seemed to include generic expenses that may or may not be related to marketing. Using the numbers from your article we can say some pharmaceutical companies spend more, and on average almost as much on marketing as they do on R&D.WRONG
Do Biopharma Companies Really Spend More on Marketing Than R&D?
As the drug pricing debate on Capitol Hill continues, the debate over how biopharma companies spend also continues, though perhaps more quietly. @
My statement still stands.
I have never heard anyone defend drug prices because those superbowl ads are really expensive.
My doctor should be telling me what drugs I need, not my TV. And my doctor should be prescribing me the right drugs based on data and not because he got an all expenses paid golf trip to Maui.
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As I said in the other thread. Generally speaking Pharmaceutical companies are not acting in evil way and nor are their employees. They are performing rather well in the system they exist in. The system in this country where we rely on the free market for our health care is driving costs twice as much as the next most expensive system. The reality is it is pricing out a significant portion of our population, creating a vast and expensive non value added insurance system, driving costs to employers to the point where they can't compete, and making a few people very rich.
Other than the assholes who got a few hundred thousand people hooked on opiods the people are doing what they are supposed to. Our political system just needs to change the rules so the system is less profit driven and driven more towards caring for people.
There is a reason why pharmaceutical companies own non-compete patents for 7 years after drug approval. If the drug is successful, then its costs will be reaped very quickly through sales. It's when a company changes the distribution method for an off patent drug to bring it back to patent or makes a change to the ingredients that doesn't actually change the drug doing the same where the bigger issues arise. You've had your protected period; make something better or find another use for it (see Botox or humira).
I think it's the negligible changes to extend patents or huge cost on low cost drugs (insulin).