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'Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model?' Goldman Sachs Analysts Ask (arstechnica.com)
In an April 10 report for biotech clients, Goldman Sachs analysts noted that one-shot cures for diseases are not great for business as they're bad for longterm profits. The investment banks' report, titled "The Genome Revolution," asks clients: "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" The answer may be "no," according to follow-up information provided. Slashdot reader tomhath shares the report from Ars Technica: Analyst Salveen Richter and colleagues laid it out: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically engineered cell therapy, and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."
For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company's hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year. [Gilead]'s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients," the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such as common cancers -- where the "incident pool remains stable" -- are less risky for business.
For a real-world example, they pointed to Gilead Sciences, which markets treatments for hepatitis C that have cure rates exceeding 90 percent. In 2015, the company's hepatitis C treatment sales peaked at $12.5 billion. But as more people were cured and there were fewer infected individuals to spread the disease, sales began to languish. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that the treatments will bring in less than $4 billion this year. [Gilead]'s rapid rise and fall of its hepatitis C franchise highlights one of the dynamics of an effective drug that permanently cures a disease, resulting in a gradual exhaustion of the prevalent pool of patients," the analysts wrote. The report noted that diseases such as common cancers -- where the "incident pool remains stable" -- are less risky for business.
There's no money to be made in health.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
ha ha ha. nothing else
Businesses need a profit. I'm sure there are some conspiracy theorists that will crop up around this point, but the amount of research and spending to get only a short burst of financial gain is impractical.
Some would argue that this should be government funded and all I can say is... well good luck, at least in the US we cut that funding for bombs and missiles.
I don't read AC
Of any President, certainly any President about to go to prison for the rest of his life.
The key is that you need an entity that is willing to think long term about peoples lives and about the useful work they can do during those lives if they are healthy.
Such an entity might need to fund research into cures like this, which would be completely unsustainable simply by payments from patients or insurance companies.
I think there is an example of such an entity up north, but not sure how they are about research funding...
People saw this endgame for private healthcare and bio research decades ago. There is a reason why humanity forms governments -- we need something that can take on what isn't profitable, but good for the group. Sheesh, this shouldn't even be debatable -- it's simple logic.
Anyone who thinks $50 rubber gloves and $700 epipens are a success of private medicine needs to travel the world and see what real health care can look like, health care that doesn't put profits above people.
Former Nazi scientists formed the Grünenthal company shortly following WW2. They were responsible for Thalidomide, they knew the effects of it yet still released it to the market. Who is "the good side"?
It has nothing to do with race you master baiter!
"Is eating the rich a sustainable business model?" asks music group Aerosmith. The answer may be "no," according to follow-up information provided.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
I understand the basic argument, but this treatment still made at least 16.5 billion dollars. I think there's still plenty of profit incentive for many treatments for common conditions.
Nothing is stopping them from curing another disease and collecting another cool $20B or so.
How do you define profit here? Business only needs to charge at cost in order to maintain their existence.
Then they will be in the position of, "do I want to pay for treatment for the next 20 years and contribute to the company's bottom line or do I want a cure for this?"
Maybe the intellectual property developed for hep c and more needs to be sold or donated to the WHO or government. Then it can be used again and again without concern for profitability. It obviously didn't cost $16bn to do the R&D for the 90% once off treatment, so do the research, profit and sell it off to non-profit.
It warms my heart to see a lolbertarian defending profit motive immediately.
Let the patients pay for every month they are healthy once they are treated. If they need more the drug company provides treatment until they are better. One stop shots would be very profitable.
These guys are what give capitalism a really bad name. Yes, a company can't exist without profits, but it's not like there aren't plenty of diseases we can't cure still. And if you think about it, indefinitely siphoning money from seriously ill people as a business model is pretty sick, no pun intended. We only put up with it as a society because it provides a powerful incentive to actually develop treatments in the first place. But if people start seeing that as a second-best option, I think society will quickly lose patience with them.
Fortunately, there are almost always those willing to offer an improved service that others aren't, if there aren't any significant barriers to doing so. In the end, it doesn't really matter that some slime think it's better NOT to cure people of illnesses outright, letting them suffer for the rest of their lives while bleeding money from them. There will also be those that choose to offer better services, like full cures, for lower overall profits. Because it's the right thing to do.
Sorry, pharmaceutical companies. You'll have to deal with that. If you start deliberately avoiding effective treatment, you invite societal wrath - probably resulting in even more soul-crushing regulation.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Cure that disease so the other ones have a chance to take root and you can make money curing them as well!
That's guaranteed long-term profit. you are known as the company that cures things and people go to you before anyone else. What's not to like about this arrangement?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They did NOT lose money on the endeavor. They made extremely large profits for a couple years... and now it's drifted down a lot as the most financially capable potential customers have now been cured. Plus a couple competitive drugs have launched.
But... yeah, they would have done financially much better selling a $20K a year drug to keep Hep-C at bay for these same customers for the rest of their lives.
Of course, not everything is about profit maximization.... it is kind of a nice thing to save thousands of lives. (Unless you are Goldman Sachs, apparently.)
with 'no'. This is why you don't leave medical science (or any important public service) up to private companies. The profit motive screws everything up. That's fine for Twinkies but not so fine for medicine. Hell, 1/3 the reason Marijuana's still illegal is big Pharma fighting to keep it (the other 2/3rds are private prisons and vaguely tough on crime politicians, respectively)
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Turns even a Sikh lady into a jew
Cynicism like that makes me think the US must be headed by a wanna be mob boss with no conscience who laundered money for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard or something...
I have to say the way patents and copy"right" work make no sense. Rather than rewarding companies appropriately based on the work performed we simply give them a monopoly for either a short period of time (patents) or an insane amount of time (copy"right").
Now I object to intellectual property as a general rule. Not as a lefty nutter, but as a libertarian. This does not mean I don't object to profiting from ones work. I do believe in private property. Just not the artificial creation of copy"right" or other "intellectual" "property".
It seems to me that it would make more sense to eliminate intellectual property entirely and fund research and development of new drugs through private charities.
80 % of the estimated cost and 8 years of time to develop an new drug is due to regulations. (Google for sources).
These mfers are not biotech but parasites on our society, end the fed.
If you morons think government can do this you are deluded indoctrinated children, look at Brittans national health service! They had had an âoeroad to deathâ program an few years ago to kill of elderly , since they are to expensive. I personally know three people killed and one that just made it by the Swedish health care, it was not malpractice but there symptoms were ignored since the government employees could not be bothered investigating it.
An private company need to make profits to survive that result in helping people. An National health systems needs itâ(TM)s patients to go away or die since there presence costs money, and there employees rather play solitaire than help you.
It is beyond the scope of Goldman Sachs or any other entity's fiduciary duty to fully perceive the largest ROI possible. Is not providing a cure a sustainable practice for humanity's long-term well being? Does only providing treatments waste resources in the long-term in the overall global economy that could be better devoted to other enterprises? The big blind that constantly rears its ugly head in "market capitalism" is that these short term considerations (ie. individual's profit during their lifetime) are, in the long term, inefficient allocations of capital. We have yet to substantially pull off any long term approaches to dealing with large, world-affecting issues as the actors and regimes change and our methodologies become outdated. However, we languish as a species as we don't even bother trying. Some social democracies experiment with such projects. However, we should not be trying to torpedo the notion but instead figure out how to incentive what is, at a glance, a no-brainer (curing disease).
The closest that I've found claims "The only disease ever 'cured' is Small Pox.". And it's infectious.
It's easy to grasp once you accept that you are effectively an animal that exists to make a profit for someone else.
Get with the program or you will die very quickly and even more unpleasantly. This is your only instruction/warning.
Why is Snark Required?
really should not be cured at all.
Then sell them leaky barrels we throw inside to keep them from drowning, so they can understand what it is like to be treated but not cured, until eventually they run out of money and drown. I am not sure if dead people will learn the moral of the story, but at least we can provide the satisfaction of a poetic death to these people?
Big pharma has been peddling antidepressants that largely don't work or are actually counter-productive, but have a host of side-effects, including suicide and addictiveness.
Some hallucinogenic drugs such as psilocybin and LSD, on the other hand, have shown remarkable, disease-changing curative properties, but are schedule 1 drugs.
We didn't need Goldman Sachs to reveal that curing patients is not the best model for big pharma. Everybody with half a brain must have known this by now. Enjoy your destructive and never-curing antidepressants.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Businesses don't need to grow ever bigger and have more profit every quarter. It's perfectly viable to run a business at a steady size and a steady profit for years. Don't confuse "growth" and "profit".
"One-shot cures" mean that you get to sell one to at most every person on earth. That is assuming they'll need at most one shot their entire life. That is currently a market of some seven milliard people. But even if that size doesn't change, if the total population stays stable, the market will not die out: People die, new ones get born, and so the pool of people that might need one of those one-shot cures replenishes itself.
So I'd say that such a business is entirely viable, up to a point. The main complaints seems to be that this model doesn't conjure "value" out of thin air like the silly valley unicorns. And that's just Goldman Sachs being Goldman Sachs, greedy beyond all reason.
Anyhow, I'm not sure that healthcare should be organised as a business. Certainly not the way the USoA does it, where insurance costs $1100/month (so most people can't afford that and so they end up in debt should they need healthcare). Over here they've recently switched to a "free market" model that really means the population gets subjected to a olicharchy of blessed insurers, and the cost of basic insurance is more like 110 euros a month. It buys you about the same in healthcare quality, which IMO could be a lot better with a different market organisation. But you'd have to stop worshipping milton "'free market'" friedman to do it.
That aside, one-shot cures aren't quite the self-extinguishing market that the greedy fucks at Goldman Sachs make it out to be. Moreover, even if they were, more healthy people means more productivity means more wealth creation elsewhere in the system. Again an argument for leaving healthcare out of that commercialisation fixation.
....That some $30 billion dollars in sales over the course of 4 years or whatnot is fucking plenty of profit for everybody involved.
It's almost as if technology is advancing beyond the useful life of capitalism.
Nah who are we kidding, praise the almighty dollar!
so what they're saying is that single-payer is the most economical healthcare system?
Goldman Sachs is a large financial company who's whole buisness is taking other people's money, and investing it to make more money for them while siphoning a portion of it for themselves as payment.
Sure many millionares and billionaries have big ticket accounts, but there's also Joe Shmo, who has a modest 140k, or 200k retirement account there. Since all the money from each account is pooled to give Goldman the capital to invest, failed investments will impact all portfolios.
Investing in companies that develop cures is all good and dandy assuming all are as successful as Gilead. However, for every successful business, there are failed ones. Here, Goldman is basically saying that in the best case scenario the profit was not good enough to justify the investment even if they made an okay profit. After all, that one 'decent' success needs to offset the number of failed companies that Goldman also had their money on.
Assuming they had a net gain including all the losses, then it comes to wither the amount expended was worth the profit. It's more than monetary here, this includes paying for research consultants, retaining experts to vet companies, visits and check ups on said companies as well as all the menagerie of departmental-ism compared to that same expenditure on something else, as you put it.. a company whose drug suppresses the illness that would produce more money over a long period of time.
As a Joe Shmo do you want to see your retirement account grow faster or slower? Big or small, we're all capitalists, and unless Goldman wanted to discriminate accounts (and get sued) every customer they have suffers or gains; details be damned apparently.
I don't read AC
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
How do you define profit here?
Income minus expenses.
Business only needs to charge at cost in order to maintain their existence.
No, an ROI of zero is not sustainable. If profits are consistently below prevailing interest rates, the business will be liquidated. Investors will be better off buying bonds instead.
Sarah?
Cure the patient then sell their information to the government and advertisers?
What about...
A wise old friend of mine used to say, "You don't stay in business by screwing people."
Your friend actually seems rather ill-informed. The oldest type of business does exactly that, is quite successful and persistently survives attempts to put it out of business. ;-)
Businesses need a profit.
That is why we also have government and university based research. For profit corporations are not the only providers.
"Is fleecing the poor a sustainable business model?" Let's ask the inventor of the guillotine.
You need medicine research to be funded by the goverment. Because the companies just said "Ain't no money in it."
Capitalism is a great system as long as there are profit motives, but falls far short where quality and safety are most important, profits be damned.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
So the business geniuses there think that a 12B peak subsiding to 4B annually is not sustainable? These are the people who brought you the mortgage meltdown and now this wisdom. Why does anyone think they give certified advice?
Medicine has the advantage that everyone gets old, and age related diseases. This means a large, and constant influx of new patients for cancer, heart disease, etc. Big Pharma will be able to keep doing business in those fields.
As for one time, new diseases, like Hepatitis C, that's a big problem. People should accept that rare diseases, are not going to get the love, and drugs, that the biggies like HIV, do. Low tech epidemiology can keep those diseases under control, as Cuba does.
Building green highways, a comprehensive network of cycling paths completely free from motorized traffic, would radically transform pharmaceutic and healthcare industries.
Of course one-shot cures are sustainable: after you create the cure, you GO AFTER THE NEXT DISEASE. These people are not looking for sustainable "business", they're after sustainable "passive income" (i.e. cash cows to milk without further effort). We're already giving these bio companies enormous favors of society (like government funding and patent ownership) to protect their work. This attitude is simply contemptuous.
Curing illnesses isn't profitable, curing symptoms is.
That question and the answer is why health care should be government run. Any for profit health care process is not going to maximize profits by keeping people healthy and curing diseases.
I see a lot of people missing OP's point, answering with infectious diseases. Probably because you need both a medical and a historical background to give him an answer -- once a problem is "cured", the memory and attention dedicated to it fades.
Pellagra, Beri-beri, Scurvy, Rickets, Vitamin A deficiency blindness. All cured with population-scale nutritional supplementation, all so rare now that most doctors in the developed world have never seen a real-life case. Goiter (Iodine-deficiency type), and neural tube defects (folate-deficiency type) less common than in the past.
Not sure if OP is interested in stuff that has been almost wiped out, but requires individual personal medical attention at some point. For instance, Eisenmenger Syndrome is rarely seen these days -- because many of the underlying congenital heart defects that lead to the condition were found by population-level neonatal screens and surgically corrected in infancy.
That's the problem with the system, in how the investors make pressure do just have each time more profits holdng back investments.
The problem is that lobby and deregulation are killing business in the country, because it blocks competition, simply because how has more can more. One day, like those old movies talking about the future, one company will run the county and they will very well eliminate anything and everything that they see as a issue for more profitd.
We are getting closer at each election to it.
... many healthcare professionals make a living off making things worse.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
We don't have health care in this country we have disease management. You can't make money off of dead people.
Your sig here!
4 billion a year in sales still comfortable falls into âblockbusterâ(TM) territory.
Multiple companies saw the medical need, resulting in at least 5 different HCV regimens on the market.
(As an aside, I believe that all the companies that developed cures were American, and the initial in vitro culturing of HCV that permitted their development was NIH funded.)
HCV went from incurable to easily curable.
Companies did well by doing good.
Prices have come down significantly as a result of competition. And the drugs will be dirt cheap in another few years when they come off patent.
This seems like a great (and rare!) example of the US economy working exactly as it should.
I think that the opiate crisis is a perfect example of their way of thinking. I guarantees a customer for life.
1. Convince (payoff) doctors that opiates are not addicting and should be more widely prescribed.
2. Lobby the FDA/DEA/etc. to allow a greater flow and easier access to opiates.
3. Get the DEA to back-off on companies who sell unusually large amounts of opiates.
4. Sit back as doctors over prescribe their wares knowing that they will be abused.
5. Watch as people get addicted to their opiates.
6. Produce drugs that counteract the effects of opiates.
7. Jack-up price of the Narcan and other like substances knowing people will pay the inflated prices while keeping the price of opiates low.
8. Sit back and count the cash as it rolls in claiming it is not our fault the DEA approved out actions.
This way the get a customer for life. And get the double bonus with selling them Narcan at an inflated price.
There is a difference between cured and eradicated. Even if you cure a particular disease, that doesn't stop people from becoming sick again with the exactly same disease (think of various sexually transmitted diseases that are cured with penicillin or other antibiotics). However a cure does not necessarily get rid of the disease.
If you eradicate a disease, then it is no more. No one can ever get the disease again. In all of human history there has one been one disease that has been eradicated - small pox (however, some strains are still in labs, so an accidental or intentional release could place that disease back into the population).
To eradicate all disease (ala Star Trek) would be an incredible feat. Don't think we have to worry about any pharmaceutical companies going out of business anytime soon.
If you applied the template of "what's in the health care/phamaceutical industry's best interests", the answer was always having a sick population. Following that, when people said there was no incentive to cure, only treat, they were called kooks.
Sure, OTOH, this company made a lot of money, and ultimately making money for the executives, even if it bankrupts the company, is the goal of the corporate leaders, i.e. the company (see private equity's "getting your bait back", and this Nobel Laureate's paper on bankruptcy for profit (PDF)). So, in terms of making huge scores for the executives, it can make sense in that context.
But make no mistake - it is most certainly in the health care / pharmaceutical industry's interests to treat, not cure.
Let's not be stupid.
I'm unwilling to bike 45 miles each way to work, especially when it is 90+ deg 5 months of the year in the afternoons. 3 months of the year, it is over 85 deg in the mornings, so I'd arrive to work sweaty.
Doubt I can get my wife to agree to move to someplace closer to my work and farther from hers and the kids are setup to attend the best high school in the region because of where we currently live.
But I suppose if we lived in Canada (anywhere north of Omaha), then it might be useful except summer (heat) and winter (cold/snow/ice).
This reveal, not anything to do with Donald Trump, may be the moment the Republicans lost the midterms.
This is yet another misleading headline from Ars.
From the CNBC report it was quoting, which in itself is only quoting excerpts:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...
"Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering "gene therapy" treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run.
"Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled "The Genome Revolution."
"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."
"The report suggested three potential solutions for biotech firms:
"Solution 1: Address large markets: Hemophilia is a $9-10bn WW market (hemophilia A, B), growing at ~6-7% annually."
"Solution 2: Address disorders with high incidence: Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) affects the cells (neurons) in the spinal cord, impacting the ability to walk, eat, or breathe."
"Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets."
You can argue with the financial analysts view but I see nothing wrong in his analysis.
And lets not forget lead poisoning. The one caused by guns.
This proves there is no lower scum than an investment banker.
All they see is dollars and if curing someone means not making a profit, they would rather see that person die.
Fuck each and every one of you that contributed to this analysis and research.
This is a classic case of where people have nothing better to do.
A 10 yo child is smart enough to understand that if you cure the sick, eventually there wont be any more sick.
The problem with this "analysis" is that the presumption that profit was ever the intention of anyone that is actually looking for a cure is utterly false. It may be true that the big giant fuck-em-all corporations want to proffit but the doctors and researchers they hire to actually find the cures are generally doing it for humanitarian, if not deeply personal, reasons.
The big giant fuck-em-all corporations came well after the first major medical breakthroughs and one can only hope they will dissappear just as quickly. Medicine and healthcare is a societal burden and the privitization of it is not going to end well. Epi shot anyone?
Period. This is probably a big reason why public health care on average is so much better then US in large parts of the world, and especially Europa.
Profits before the cures for smallpox, cancer, hepatitis-C, etc?
Well, I guess blame the parents applies to those analysts. As well as those patients.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
This is why health care must be a non-profit business. As soon as it is about maximizing profits the goal is to keep folks from dying, but sick enough to require permanent medical care. This report also shows that financial megacorps like GS have ZERO ethics. That they even bother with such a report is utterly disgusting.
Let's get one thing straight: the company that innovates cures has only a limited time frame for profiting from the risks they took in developing the cure or treatment.
Small molecule drugs are treatments. For a small molecule drug that time horizon is about 12 years (drug development after invention and regulatory approval time cuts it back from 20 years). Then the generics enter the market, and well, the profitability of treatment goes bye-bye.
The picture is better for biologic drugs because biosimilars are harder to get approved and cannot undercut the price of the innovator product as much because manufacturing costs are so high for biologics. The statutory exclusivity period is 12 years for biologics under the Affordable Care Act.
The genetic editing cure market is brand new. Yet it will be constrained by the same laws and market forces that constrain small molecule drugs and biologics. An innovator only has a limited time of profitability. For the innovator the time to profit from a cure and a treatment will be about the same. But the price that can be charged for a cure instead of a treatment will be much higher. The profitability of cures instead of treatments should be better for the innovator than the innovator, if not the market as a whole. Cures screw the generic companies, not the innovator.
You're right. Capitalism is terrible. And yet, preferable to any other economic system anyone has thought of.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Treat the symptom: it lasts a lifetime and costs a fortune, benefiting noone but the one offering the treatment, and exposes the patient to a host of pleasantly worded yet negative--and sometimes fatal--side effects.
Treat the cause: it takes less time, even offering future hope for prevention and likely costs much less, and only benefits the one receiving the cure (although it be construed as a feather in the cap), and rarely has any harmful side effects.
Is it any wonder doctors and big pharma are typically rich? Those who are ill are their cash cow... to actually heal them would be anathema to the point of their own livelihoods.
For years, the big pharmaceutical companies have focused on producing new drugs that don't cure anything, but just ameliorate symptoms for a while. Drugs that people continue buying for the rest of their life are their big money-makers. Think blood pressure drugs, statins and other cholesterol drugs, and, of course, the big cash cows, Viagra and its act-alikes. Conversely, no one is investing much in vaccines and antibiotics -- they are only used once to cure a patient.
U.S. citizens die sooner than even U.K citizens.
Perhaps. But TFA isn't about retail medicine. It is about funding R&D. For medical R&D, America does far more than any other country. Europeans are basically freeloaders leeching off American R&D spending.
In 2015, America spent USD 47B on R&D, while Europe spent EUR 33.5B (USD ~41B):
* https://www.efpia.eu/publications/data-center/the-pharma-industry-in-figures-rd/pharmaceutical-rd-expenditure-in-europe-usa-and-japan/
That money also seems (at least in the past) to have more productive results:
* https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2009/pr-light-pharma-study-082109.html
Of the top ten Big Pharma companies, nine spend more on marketing than R&D (the one exception being Roche, with a delta of USD 300M):
* https://www.vox.com/2015/2/11/8018691/big-pharma-research-advertising
According to fundamental economic principles, if a person is productive (means, produces goods and services for the community, and in return gets money from the community), and a disease inhibits that productivity, then the cure of said disease would lead to the increased production (wealth) that the involved society would enjoy. The Goldman analyst was using a myopic analysis which simply looked at the immediate gain from the individual drug, rather than the big picture. Combining truly curative measures with long term productive relationships with the patient, or with a life insurance policy, would be a superior strategy. Also, doctors could sleep a little easier at night and Hyppocrates would not have to spin in his grave (as much).
Basement-dwelling nerds that think they can figure out healthcare. Endless stupid postings about a click-bait article.
Is that really a sustainable business model?
There are all sorts of things that are profitable... and illegal. This sort of reasoning is the result of pure psychopathic thinking, and should be a warning sign to the rest of us.
This isn't some sort of "bold strategic thinking" because it is a question that normal human beings simply shouldn't ask.
The question should not be "is curing people a sustainable model?" Because of course the answer form a business standpoint is an overwhelming no. But instead we should ask. "Do we want to invest or do business with people who ask this question." Because, consumer standpoint, if we let businesses decide the ethics by which we are treated they will always move towards their intrests. But if we cut those businesses off when they do I moral thing, it will stand as a reminder; that no matter how much money your business has you can still loose everything if everyone refuses to do business with you because of your ethics.
The medical industry is full of perverse incentives. Companies will never do clinical tests of any remedy that can't be patented, and managing diseases is much more profitable than curing diseases. I propose a different funding model: the health insurance providers band together and research medical procedures that will save them money, rather than maximize pharma profits. Of course, that requires all the insurance companies work together as a consortium -- I imagine the Pharma execs would start screaming for anti-trust regulation if that happened.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Ah, good to see you advancing the need for non-profits in this part of society and the economy!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Producing a lifelong addiction to the medication is the preferred business model and always has been the "gold standard" for business. Every dealer of illicit drugs knows that fact.
To be left to the ham-fisted "invisible hand" of the marketplace
The morally neutral report said pharma had 3 solutions: address large markets, address disorders with high incidence, constant innovation and portfolio expansion.
Curing is not sustainable, but they missed an obvious 4th solution which is to leak new incurable diseases with tailor-made ongoing life treatment options.
Exactly. That's why the goal of Medicare should be to kill off its patients as soon as possible. Saves on Social Security, too. However, the doctor lobby opposes that, because it cuts down the time they can milk Medicare for useless patient visits.
Beau,
you fucking Dink,
Why is this news for nerds?
This is so fucking MORBID, Off topic of the publication and fucking Gross. Quit sucking on msmash. It's rotting your head.
This is dumb.
Fuck SLASHDOT
BEAU, msmash you all killed it.
your heads so far up your asses, you have totally lost it. The Methane has rotted your fucking heads..
I'm not a person to advocate violence, but I bet if someone could identify you on a passing sidewalk, dont be suprised if you got PUNKED like a bitch..
Look, we have a lot of software developers in here. Do any of you really believe your job is in jeopardy or potentially unprofitable, simply because whatever you code will become obsolete and unused within a decade or so? Hopefully not, because you realize it's about continually updating what you write and coming up with brand new things to code. You don't learn to code so you can write one thing, and then expect to sit back and profit from it for the rest of your life - deciding you never need to code again.
That seems a lot like this article.... complaining because if you successfully make a drug to cure a disease, it will eventually stop being useful because you made the disease go extinct. So what? You've got PLENTY of other diseases you can work on curing, and plenty of opportunities to help alleviate symptoms with other drugs in the meantime, while you try to find more cures. If you are good at doing these things,you'll continue to be very profitable.
if we switched to Medicare for all. We could pay off the national _debt_ with that money. If you're a fiscal conservative you pretty much have to support Medicare for All.
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alive and cured them were made in Europe. Most of that kind of research is done in Europe because you can't get the US to pay for research that isn't profitable.
More money spent doesn't necessarily mean better outcomes when the point of that spending is to bring in profits on a short term scale. If anything most basic science is being done in Europe and the US is leaching off it that (much more valuable) science.
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It's really about the fixed costs being covered in the US. That whole thing about bulk pricing is just a mechanism for stabilizing revenue flows.
Americans could NEVER be offered prices similar to Europe/Canada/South America because manufacturers would have to reallocate the fixed costs to those other countries. This would blow up THEIR pricing and also slow down recovery of the fixed costs the investors were so eager to recoup in the first place. The shareholders' lawsuits would clog the courts for a decade.
With the insurance companies, lobbyists, legislators, and manufacturers locked in an unholy embrace there is unlikely to be any change in the near future.
My two cents.
That's just not what happens. In practice you have single payer systems where doctors remain private but the government is the single payer (e.g. single insurer). This maintains the incentive to keep costs down. Meanwhile, and I know this sounds crazy, most doctors are good people who would prefer to permanently cure people. That's because they're close enough to their patients to see their suffering and empathize with them. We also spend a healthy chunk of their educational time encouraging them to believe this too (bordering on indoctrination to be honest).
Being a doctor is insanely hard work. To do it you have to love it for it's own sake. Nobody's going to make it through 8 years of medical school and 8 years of residencies just 'cause the money's good. You need a level of obsession that transcends money to pull that off (unless you're talking General Practitioners, but they just do OK).
A mixed system is fine, which is why most places do single payer. The point where the profit motive breaks the system is when it's time to pay doctors. That's not surprising. If you put biz people in charge of paying you give them an incentive to not pay. You fix that with single payer. As for your Doctors, you need to pay them well, but it doesn't take Rock Star money any more than you have to pay working musicians like that because Doctors _like_ being Doctors.
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Technically the Communists won WWII.
Capitalism won the cold war.
The Term
"click bait"
Capitalism lost a long time ago, corporate socialism won.
This statement "Are one-shot cures good for business?" highlights two things: businesses are greedy and don't have societies interests first (no real surprise there, ask any illicit drug dealer, mafia hit man, etc.), and two: social enterprises (health, education) are best left to national governments whos interest *is* society. In fact, you need government oversight for any business (full stop). The need for government (only) hospitals, pharmacy labs, education are highlighted here. Even well educated students aren't in businesses best interests, because someone smarter than current businesses can start their own business and (!HORROR!) compete with the first business. Keeping students just a bit stupid is like keeping patients just a bit sick: it keeps services in demand and profits rolling in. If you are in such a business, then public education and health are bad, bad, bad. If you are (or ever were) a student or patient, (or ever will be), then public education and health are good. From a taxpayer model, its good too since your tax dollars aren't lining a private investors pockets (who wants money for doing nothing).
Whooooosh!
"Sure, we could save humanity, but where's the profit in that? Fuck 'em."
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
Radio Series, Episode 11:
The Book: The major problem which the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle - after cures had been found for all the major diseases, and instant repair systems had been invented for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death - was that of employment. Planets full of bronzed, healthy, clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists - simply because no one had discovered a cure for the universe as a whole, or rather, the only one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors. Then it was noticed, that like most forms of medical treatment, total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness, lack of - well anything very much, and with these conditions came the realisation that nothing turned, say, a slightly talented musician, into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness. And nothing turned a perfectly normal, healthy individual into a great political or military leader better than irreversible brain damage. Suddenly everything changed. Previously best-selling books such as ’How I Survived an Hour With a Sprained Finger’ were swept away in a flood of titles such as ’How I Scaled the North Face of the Megaperna With a Perfectly Healthy Finger But Everything Else Sprained, Broken, or Bitten Off by a Pack of Mad Yaks’. And so doctors were back in business - recreating all the diseases and injuries they had abolished - in popular, easy-to-use forms. Thus, given the right and instantly available types of disability, even something as simple as turning on the Three-D T.V. could become a major challenge. And when all the programs on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft-palettes, speaking lines by dyslexic writers, filmed by blind cameramen, instead of merely seeming like that, it somehow made the whole thing more worthwhile."
This is exactly why many things should not be left to business. Those things need to be handled by society - and for many things that means leveraging tax dollars to do what is right for the minority negatively impacted by policies - such as those driven by the Goldman-Sachs statement - from the majority. The research and development funded through these programs will actually help us all through the development of new technologies, and advancement of fundamental science applications beyond the original target, that would be in the public domain (if you need a reason beyond ethical considerations to do what is right). That, of course is a long term viewpoint which, while most beneficial, is not on the radar of current business economic theory which puts quarterly profit increases as the only measure of success.
A corporation is really a social contract between the owners of the corporation and society that allows that organization to gain benefits above and beyond that of a person (lower tax rates, special legal considerations/access...etc), not only to benefit the owners, but also to benefit society as a whole. With the means of low cost production distributed now in the hands of people given technological advancements in the last few decades (e.g. 3D printing, VR/AR, the Internet etc), and corporations automating both mental and physical tasks via information technology (cloud computing, AI etc) and robotics (the next evolution in harnessing technology to increase human power that started with domestication of animals, through mechanical impacts of the industrial age), the argument that jobs are the primary benefit of corporations to society is growing thin. Beyond profits for the shareholders/owners, what benefits to society do corporations provide?
I think that is the question we should all be asking ourselves as we make decisions about what products to purchase, and what investments to make (e.g. most working people have 401K accounts - and thus are shareholders/owners themselves in some small way). If a company invests in a long term view then they should be rewarded. If they don't, then they are not fulfilling their social contract. This would be encouraged if regulations were put in place to make investment in long term research count as much as profits in the stock markets' analysis of corporate performance. Furthermore, given the nature of some long term research costs, tax incentives should be made available to corporations that invest, and penalize those who don't.
Finally, there are many things that are just too big, and too important for corporations to handle. These items will need to have government funding. There's no way around it if you want to protect and provide needed advancements and resultant benefits to society.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Once all the greedheads are burning in Hellfire and the rest of us normal, sane, decent people can get on with developing said treatments. Until then, no, because these people don't give a fuck about patients. They just want money. I say infect them all with some kind of nightmare multi-drug-resistant bacteria, corral them all together in some biosafety-restricted laboratory, and let them kill and cannibalize one another.
Businesses don't need to grow ever bigger and have more profit every quarter. It's perfectly viable to run a business at a steady size and a steady profit for years. Don't confuse "growth" and "profit".
"One-shot cures" mean that you get to sell one to at most every person on earth. That is assuming they'll need at most one shot their entire life. That is currently a market of some seven milliard people. But even if that size doesn't change, if the total population stays stable, the market will not die out: People die, new ones get born, and so the pool of people that might need one of those one-shot cures replenishes itself.
So I'd say that such a business is entirely viable, up to a point. The main complaints seems to be that this model doesn't conjure "value" out of thin air like the silly valley unicorns. And that's just Goldman Sachs being Goldman Sachs, greedy beyond all reason.
Anyhow, I'm not sure that healthcare should be organised as a business. Certainly not the way the USoA does it, where insurance costs $1100/month (so most people can't afford that and so they end up in debt should they need healthcare). Over here they've recently switched to a "free market" model that really means the population gets subjected to a olicharchy of blessed insurers, and the cost of basic insurance is more like 110 euros a month. It buys you about the same in healthcare quality, which IMO could be a lot better with a different market organisation. But you'd have to stop worshipping milton "'free market'" friedman to do it.
That aside, one-shot cures aren't quite the self-extinguishing market that the greedy fucks at Goldman Sachs make it out to be. Moreover, even if they were, more healthy people means more productivity means more wealth creation elsewhere in the system. Again an argument for leaving healthcare out of that commercialisation fixation.
Why this is moderated a troll makes no sense.
Trying to re-write history? Capitalism won that war and everyone knows it. Maybe you forget about all the supplies the US sent to Russia? Lend/lease, etc. They would have been overrun without Capitalism. They were clueless and depended on the US Patent office and admitted it. That's capitalism. Fountain of knowledge and progress for society. Only the stupid deny that (stupid as in they don't know any better, not that they're not intelligent. Smart people can be stupid).
Communism kills.
To the point in Japan, the communists weren't even in that action except for one day. So your statement is ignores history and facts.
That you don't have the cash to run a company doesn't mean you can demand a profit if someone one won't lend you the cash for zero profit. Building societies are business run without profit. Most charities are businesses, and they are not allowed to have profit. The problem with your failing business is you, not a lack of profit.
Capitalism is as shit as all the other bad ideas that failed but had too much power to end by its own admission (see communist russia's command economy: all it did was faile EARLIER, capitalism has failed WORSE, just took more time to do it.) The only ones preferring it are the ones making out like bandits. An ever shrinking number as the failure of capitalism is held off by those profiting from it.
Hate and bigotry have no place in a discussion that should be based on compassion and care. I have no doubt many of the scientists and doctors contributing to the development of such a cure where Jewish. Certainly the companies name suggests as much.
It's about healing and curing, not profiting you inhuman POS
Care for those less fortunate than yourself and give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
"The love of money is the root of all evil."
Aerosmith would (an should) get eaten then. If you get a chance to see the special on the band Kansas, listen to what they have to say about Steven Tyler.
Just another day in Paradise
These type of therapies should ultimately be part of a customizable system. It will require patient genetic input and a customized genetic output. So the basic process could cover cures but also cosmetics. Like lets say eye color. It is the cosmetics where the profit center will be along maybe with tweaks (A change that broadens the spectrum the eye can see or maybe gives greater resolution to spectrum changes).
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