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Citing 'Moral Requirement To Make Money', Pharma CEO Jacks Drug Price 400% (arstechnica.com)
The chief executive of a small pharmaceutical company defended hiking the price of an essential antibiotic by more than 400 percent and told the Financial Times that he thinks "it is a moral requirement to make money when you can." From a report: Nirmal Mulye, CEO of the small Missouri-based drug company Nostrum Laboratories, raised the price of bottle of nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392 last month. The drug is a decades-old antibiotic used to treat urinary-tract infections caused by Escherichia coli and certain other Gram-negative bacteria. The World Health Organization lists nitrofurantoin as an essential medicine. In an interview with the FT, Mulye went on to say it was also a "moral requirement" to "sell the product for the highest price," and he explained that he was in "this business to make money."
a better solution would be to let the US citizens freely engage in commerce and give them a choice to purchase drugs from overseas
love is just extroverted narcissism
Canadian here. Most people love our health care system and will fight to keep it. Yes there are some downsides, like some longer waits. Yet people who really need it do get care immediately. It's not really as bad as the vocal minority make it sound. Don't just take my word for it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Patents have never been to spur innovation. Their purpose is to preserve knowledge. We as society decided we would trade a limited monopoly on an invention for the complete description of that invention. The invention was supposed to be innovative such that any other person knowledgeable in the craft would say "hey, that's a really good idea, I can use that". I should want to read patents because they would teach me, they should be a resource when I want to solve a problem. Journalists should publish them in trade journals because of the innovation in them.
Inventors will invent because we want to solve problems, because there is profit in providing solutions to our customers. We don't need patents to do that. (and we don't need drug patents either - our way of developing drugs is wasteful and broken)
Today when someone actually comes up with something innovative they often don't patent it. Manufacturing methods, if they are truly useful are rarely patented. Small companies can't defend a patent and any inventor who is altruistic will publish their idea almost anywhere other than the patent office. Not only are patents now unreadable (I can't make any sense of any of the patents my name is on) but we are told not to read them because it might increase our companies liability.
When companies spend more money on patent lawyers than on new product development (Apple, google, Oracle) or get screwed when they don't (RIM/Black Berry) we have a problem.
It is now your moral duty to shun East Texas and actively fight patent laws.
If you remove the money from the equation, the incentive to develop new medicines goes down.
Precisely why it should be decommercialized and ran by the government. Research can go back to where research for this should be, universities. Funding will be paid by all tax payers. So the scientists working on the research can still make high salaries, but the cost of the drugs will go down drastically since there won't be companies trying to make stock holders happy and CEO/CFO/CIOs who don't do any of the work collecting 7+ figure incomes. They don't need to turn a profit, just cover costs. Win win for billions of people, only losers in this deal are the couple hundred assholes running these companies.
This has nothing to do with rewarding success. Currently, drug companies have ZERO incentive to cure anything. If they can make you feel better, but not cure you, they win and you think you won. The research needs to be on the cure. In order to do that, you HAVE to remove profit and greed from the equation.
If you remove the money from the equation, the incentive to develop new medicines goes down.
What was it again, only 5% of new medicines actually add something new to the table? You could say that therefore 95% of new medicines are medicines in search of an ailment to medicate. That's the money incentive. I don't think taking that away is problematic. On the contrary, it frees up resources to properly test medicines that are developed on non-monetary incentives, such as gaining the ability to cure loved ones.
While this isn't immediately visible, we might find a disease arise that no one cares to research and cure in the future. So, bad juju in the long run.
I'm pretty sure that should such a disease arise we'll also rise to the challenge of curing it, somehow. There'll be specific money grants and whatnots to make it happen. It doesn't mean you need to keep big corporate conglomerates on hand, with large R&D departments chugging through money producing medicines in search of ailments to medicate just so you'll have them at the ready for such an eventuality.
Look at, say, AIDS. It took us quite a while to catch on, then to get the research started, then to find something useful. In the meanwhile, lots of large corporate R&D labs have been chugging through money producing medicines that had nothing to do with AIDS whatsoever, weren't even trying. They didn't all zoom in on the latest threat like a laser. They kept doing whatever it was they were doing.
So I don't buy your "bad juju in the long run". In the long run, we just up the number of people we train to be medicine researchers as and when needed.
When you don't reward success, you are doomed to mediocrity. That is why I'm not sure this is a bad thing. He may, in fact, have a moral obligation to make money because it rewards success.
Pfft, that doesn't appear to fly either. We rewarded success by making a shifty asshole the richest man on earth and his software still was and is mediocre (if you squinted a lot--not usable if you were honest).
Anyway, "money" doesn't equal "success". "Success" is what you say it is. Like, I'm told Finnish schoolteachers aren't paid all that much, and despite that obvious lack of monetary incentive they do deliver good work. Their success is delivering well-educated young adults, and the respect they get for that. So you can have success without (lots of) money.
Which is really what "decommercialising medicine" is about. Make the medicine as a non-profit. Workers still get paid fair wages, but the institution that makes the medicine is no longer driven by the need to make lots of money, the necessity to fellate predatory institutional investors (*cough* raiding pension funds *cough*), that sort of thing. For medicine makers, making the medicine affordably for patients is the moral thing to do, not charging through the nose for the medicine.
It is conventional wisdom that commercial enterprises need to reserve money for R&D so they can come up with the next product and thereby survive. But that assumes a market dominated by human fickleness. It doesn't go for, say, farmers, because come next year we still want our staple foods. R&D isn't really central to what they do. Same with medicine: Come next year the next generation will still need their vaccination shots, and unless we outright eradicate an illness, there'll be afflicted patients in need of medicine.
So no, I'm not buying your arguments. I do find that they arise from hidden assumptions, and I say those aren't valid in this case.
As someone who's lived in both places, I can tell you that the biggest downside of Canadian system over US is all the times where you'd really like to get care right away, but you're not going to die if you don't. *That's* the stuff that really sucks in Canada.
Emergency room visits where you're not bleeding out on the floor, or finding an obstetrician when you get pregnant that's not an hour away, finding a specialist to listen to your baby's heart when it sounds a little off, father needing a hip replacement... With all of those, I've had bad experiences in Canada.
In US, if I need a doctor, I can almost always find one the next day, or next week if it's a really unique case. It absolutely sucks having to deal with insurance, costs, and so on, don't get me wrong.... but it is nice to know that I can see someone quickly when I need help.
Both sides need improvement, and Canadian system is a much better starting point... but it's not all roses up there either :(.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
You can buy generic Nitrofurantoin in the US for $15 for 14 capsules. That's what the free market provides.
The reason American insurance companies pay $2800 for the same treatment is because under the ACA, they can get away with this crap and maximize their profits.
The US has a large single payer system and it is horrendously inefficient. If you want to use single payer to lower drug prices, you need European-style nationalized healthcare.