I'm sure Novo Nordisk would survive even with slightly lower margins.
Also what proportion of that $1,000 goes to the manufacturer? From what I understand various middlemen and such get a significant proportion of that without providing any value?
I have no idea what Americans overpaying for healthcare has to do with a Danish drug company participating in the Canadian Healthcare market.
I’d rather thank the Canadian government for having a drug pricing review process.
If these companies don’t want to sell their drugs here, no one is making them. They are still here, so I think it’s safe to assume that they are still making money.
I don’t think it should be controversial to say that if the US imposed a Canadian-style price control regime on more than the handful of drugs currently regulated by Medicare, the future number of drugs developed and commercialized would drop significantly.
It’s just basic addressable market vs. development cost math.
The drug companies in Canada are part of the drug pricing process. Their development costs are considered. In exchange, they get additional monopoly priveleges on patented medicine.
Canada doesn’t even have particularly low drug pricing compared to the rest of the world, the opposite in fact. Canada just had low drug prices compared to the most expensive market on the planet.
It’s possible that lower drug prices in one country would disincentivize a global industry that touches almost every human on earth. Or it could not.
The number of drugs developed would drop. In particular, the really expensive to develop drugs that target rare conditions, exploit novel pathways, or require difficult synthesis.
The kinds of drugs that routinely experience years of delayed availability in markets like Canada and the UK until the learning curve has kicked in via the US and other less constrained markets.
Personally, I think that they would cut other cost centers before they cut the only department that ensures their long term success
The industry could save tens or of billions per year by not advertising (this is a US thing, drug ads are nonexistent in many places), and eliminating pricing games, cost rebate programs, coupons, drug reps, etc. These are all significant costs and friction that don’t exist in most other countries.
My personal feeling is that claiming that the worlds least cost efficient healthcare system with many layers of added complexity is the driver behind pharmaceutical budgets is marginal.
And of course you have to consider that a significant portion of drug research costs are paid by government and other institutional grants
Your comments come across as more aggressive than perhaps you intend them to. We've had to ask you similar things before.
Telling someone that their spending is "fucking egregious" and "who knows what else you didn't mention", would land with most people as quite a provocation. The fact that cj replied courteously says something good about cj, but your comment broke the site guidelines and we need you not to do that.
It's easy to underestimate the amount of provocation in one's own comments—we all do that to some extent. I don't know if it's helpful or not but here are a bunch of past attempts I've made to explain this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I dont track it. I order instacart a couple times a month which costs $300 per order. Plus eating out. So about $1k or more a month. Single, live alone.
