And I also wish more people realized that drug companies are sitting flush either. Lilly posted about a billion in profit this quarter. Gilead posted $4B in losses. Novartis posted about $2B in profit.
That sounds like a lot. It is, to a degree. Do you think they should fund this treatment for free for 2000 people? Because 600,000 people die from cancer every year. Just in the US.
Insurance companies? Anthem made about a billion. State Farm lost $71M. The list goes on.
Hospitals are doing far worse.
You can cut researcher salaries; great, you just impacted the people who are literally doing the research to save peoples' lives. You can cut executive salaries; they mostly get paid in stock anyway, and its not like their job isn't important. You can rely on public research; uh oh, the public just elected Mr. Donald, who called the NHS "broken". #Defunded.
I hate the expediency of some people. Let's look for an easy answer to this problem: Drug companies are greedy! Or... How about this: drug research is fucking difficult, which makes it very expensive. And also: humans are designed to die. There are a billion things on this planet that can kill us, and quite often when drug companies fix one of them, those little asshole bacteria get three times stronger and fight back, or humans discover a new thing to smoke or drink that gives them cancer.
And then the same people who just finished a large milkshake from McDonalds hop online or go to a protest and yell that drugs are too expensive.
Can you defend the huge marketing budgets of the pharma companies? I have to imagine any new-drug-awareness or training for physician roles covered currently by marketing could be filled adequately at pennies on the dollar compared to current marketing spend. Advertising and marketing are largely zero-sum so we should be able to trim quite a bit of fat there without impacting health outcomes (although cable companies and other advertising platforms would take a hit).
Pharmaceutical marketing is pricey because a lot of it is in-person using sale reps. There are a few companies doing pricey DTC TV ads, but it's for s small fraction of all the drugs out there.
I also think people way overestimate how much the average physician knows about new drugs. They don't have time to do it. Talking with a sales rep for 10 mins to get your questions answered can be very efficient.
A few years back a friend told me about his company (pharma) that was selling a drug for hepatitis C. The drug was going to be obsolete when a competitor launched, so they wanted to make sure docs didn't buy a ton of it otherwise they'd be returning it.
What was amazing were the number of doctors who continued to buy it. The sales reps had to go to the office and ask "why are you buying this drug? the new drugs are so much better, it would be unethical to continue to use this drug".
The doctors had no idea the new drug had launched.
That sounds like a lot. It is, to a degree. Do you think they should fund this treatment for free for 2000 people? Because 600,000 people die from cancer every year. Just in the US.
Insurance companies? Anthem made about a billion. State Farm lost $71M. The list goes on.
Hospitals are doing far worse.
You can cut researcher salaries; great, you just impacted the people who are literally doing the research to save peoples' lives. You can cut executive salaries; they mostly get paid in stock anyway, and its not like their job isn't important. You can rely on public research; uh oh, the public just elected Mr. Donald, who called the NHS "broken". #Defunded.
I hate the expediency of some people. Let's look for an easy answer to this problem: Drug companies are greedy! Or... How about this: drug research is fucking difficult, which makes it very expensive. And also: humans are designed to die. There are a billion things on this planet that can kill us, and quite often when drug companies fix one of them, those little asshole bacteria get three times stronger and fight back, or humans discover a new thing to smoke or drink that gives them cancer.
And then the same people who just finished a large milkshake from McDonalds hop online or go to a protest and yell that drugs are too expensive.