
Pharma's Bizarre Pricing Shrug - Amorymeltzer
http://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2015-11-16/drug-price-pressures-have-only-just-begun
======
nonbel
Worst case scenario:

People will be getting screened earlier and earlier. They will be told they
have a horrible disease but there is nothing they can do about it because it
is too expensive. The mortality rates from the major killers like heart
disease and cancer will drop. This will not be a good sign though. The
mortality rates from suicide and poisoning from attempts at self medication
will rise. The deaths will just be moved from one to the other category,
giving the false appearance of effective and safe treatments.

~~~
Scoundreller
Best-case scenario: Alternate markets will pop up to supply the molecules.
There are plenty of such markets out there, I doubt patent-ignorance is beyond
them.

------
pavlov
_Gene therapies may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more than $1
million, for one-time treatments. Companies are pouring resources into
developing more such drugs, with no real thought to who will pay for them, or
how, and no acknowledgement that the current pricing model can 't expand
infinitely._

I wonder if it's reasonable to expect something like Moore's Law for gene
therapy?

A 1980s Cray supercomputer cost over $1 million. Today the same amount of
computing power is available in the cheapest Android phone you can find.

If the same trajectory applies for gene therapy, it won't be about finding
more million-dollar payers. Only those with the most serious chronic diseases
will pay for it now, but in 30 years, all of us will have gene therapy for
what today would seem like trivial alterations.

~~~
themartorana
It's absolutely what will happen (see wind, solar energy or _anything_ that
has ever caused market shifts) - in fact, it's pretty incredible that the
article doesn't acknowledge this. If the argument was about whether or not
prices would drop fast enough, that would have been cogent.

~~~
bigchewy
you may not be familiar with how healthcare works. There is, generally, almost
no price pressure. In fact, consumers of healthcare, because they aren't
paying for it, often equate higher price with higher quality so I wouldn't bet
on the prices going down

~~~
killface
but with medical tourism becoming more reliable and trusted, as well as
companies hq'd in countries unencumbered by our insistence on patents for
biology, it's likely this is where another country takes the "top" spot from
the US. China, Brazil, and India all seems like good potentials.

~~~
DrScump
Medical tourism doesn't work for chronic disease requiring recurring
visits/treatments... unless you _move_ there.

~~~
WildUtah
_unless you move there_

It's a big opportunity for Mexico, then. Already home of the most cost
effective first world (OECD) universal health care system, Mexico has good
facilities right on the US border in half a dozen cities and is popular for
eye and dental procedures for US visitors already.

------
scientes
Nothing in this article mentions that National Institutes of Health public-
sector funding does all the work in general research before they give a patent
to the private sector so that the public pays twice.

RT on US public research:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN5_j7Yq9WA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN5_j7Yq9WA)

(Note I think public funding for science is a good thing, unlike this attack
piece by RT, but that is not the point.)

Chomsky also talks about how state-sector created the transistor for example
at AT&T Bell Labs.

------
bmelton
Having "seen the light" on Shkreli's actions, I can't help but wonder whether
or not I'm missing something or if people are just intent on driving a false
narrative into the ground.

Yes, he jacked the prices up, but only after getting it on a co-pay schedule,
which means that like most drugs, you'll pay your insurance co-pay for it, but
not the sticker price.

For those without insurance, or who cannot afford it, they've stated (and has
been corroborated) that they're happy to give Daraprim away for free.

At the end of the day, the cost of the drug to the insured doesn't really go
up by a whole lot, and the cost of the drug to the uninsured (but not 1
percenter) has actually gotten cheaper. In the meantime, Shkreli will be able
to funnel Daraprim profits into research for the drug to keep it from becoming
irrelevant, as it currently will be if left alone because the disease that it
prevents supposedly evolves, and if left alone, would eventually slide from
70% effective to 60%, to 50%, etc.

Meanwhile, for anybody to which that isn't an acceptable solution, these guys
have released an alternative for $1 a pill. It may set back drug-parasitic
relations in the process, but it's there, it's cheap, and people won't be
dying as a result of the price hike.

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/23/news/companies/imprimis-
dara...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/23/news/companies/imprimis-daraprim-
turing-martin-shkreli/)

~~~
FireBeyond
Where do you think the balance beyond the co-pay is coming from, though?
Magical wish-granting insurance fairies?

Sorry for the sarcastic tone, but your argument, as stated by Shkreli himself,
seems to think that people believe that the hundreds (or more) dollars a month
they pay in insurance premiums has absolutely nothing to do with this. "But
your copay will only be $20 and you won't pay a cent more!"

No, you (or your employer, who could otherwise be paying you that money) will
be paying -every last cent- of the price rise. Just largely as an amortized
monthly premium, not an out-of-pocket co-pay at the time you pick up your
script.

Shkreli seems to believe that people would fall for his argument that somehow
the balance of the cost of the drug would be paid by ... I don't know who,
exactly, hence those magical fairies ... and not by us.

And in a lot of cases, he's right.

~~~
bmelton
Sarcastic tone forgiven, because I was there once too, but it seems like it's
mostly liberals and progressives who are upset by this, while conservatives
and capitalists more willing to forgive it. That seems backwards to me, as the
progressive argument is that costs should be spread throughout society, from
the haves to the have nots, and that if this is already the shell game of
insurance anyway, it seems silly that Daraprim wasn't already playing it.

Either way, the capitalists had the right of it -- if the price was too high,
there's a $1 per pill alternative right now. Assuming that all else holds
true, I just don't see the harm here any more than I see the harm in Motorola
charging $800 for their top of the line cell phones while Wal-Mart has one for
a small fraction of that.

~~~
Rotten194
You see no difference between a life-saving medication and a _smartphone_?
__No __difference? Not even a little bit?

