River Dog wrote:Oh, I realize it. 60% of our drugs come from European manufacturers. But where they're made isn't as important as where they are sold:
For many medications sold in the United States, particularly those that are still under patent protection, profit margins are already generous. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, brand-name drugs are marked up 322% in the U.S. compared to other countries. The average markup across both brand name and generic medications is 278%.https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... r-AA1JYy5QWithout the US market to sell their products, European manufacturers, like domestic companies, won't have the financial motivation to finance R&D. They'll make only drugs that are off the shelf and already approved.
This is just not true. Drug and medical development would always exist because regardless of income level, people get sick. Medicine is like the police: you never want to use it, but it's good it's there.
I invest in a lot of companies. I would not at all be surprised if they moved to a public option we wouldn't see improved drug discovery focused on solving problems rather than making profits. A lot of the time you have several companies competing for the same markets and using patents to limit other companies from entering a market, when we would all be better off if all the minds were focused on curing the condition rather than profiting it off as much as possible. It's why the pharma lobby blocked access to Americans going to Canada to ensure maximum profits on people taking as many medications as possible and being as sick as possible.
I'm not sure why you think the profit motive is so great for medicine when curing a condition means profits all gone. Capitalism incentivizes maximizing sickness to maximize profits. That's not a great idea at all.
It's like privatizing prisons that make money the more people that are incarcerated. Where is the incentive to reduce crime and improve the overall justice system when large companies are making money off incarceration?
The conflict of interest creates a bad situation. For some reason most Americans can't see the conflict of interest even when most drug and medical delivery starts in public systems like universities, then moves to private systems.
The big advantage of Big Pharma is not drug discovery, but mass production. Drug discovery is actually not that expensive. It's usually a focused, small team of scientists that develop a drug or therapy, then launch tests. It's once approval is accomplished that sales and mass production becomes very expensive.
That's why I think you could design a better system to help with the mass production costs with better price controls in place. I've been investing in these companies for years. It's a long, long process to develop a drug or medical therapy, but it's often done with public money or a joint public and private combination. It's not that expensive to get the design process going. It takes a long, long time due to how rigorous you must be for human use. Once it clears a Phase 3 clinical trial and is ready for sale, that's when the costs ramp big.
It's an interesting process. You can make a lot of money on approvals, though so many drugs fail or don't work as well as expected. Everyone is reaching for the golden ticket in biotech even if their drug is half-ass or unnecessary. It's almost an over-saturated market that could be better focused.
The way our current government is set up Big Pharma lobbies too much to resist change, same as insurers. Though they are taking the big hit with you know who and their stocks are absolutely hammered all thanks to the BBB. Alliteration...a rhetorical technique for selling.
I can't help but get into these topics sometimes. So much going on in Biotech and medical insurance right now. Not sure if the stocks are bargains or soon to be wreckage. Some AI companies are developing powerful AI loaded with decades of information that will allow the conducting of tests using AI which is supposed to advance and quicken drug discovery. I'm betting AI will seriously help with medical diagnosis allowing a bunch of information to be fed into an AI machine to assist doctors. It's going to be like a sci fi movie come to life at some point, but even better like smartphones can do more than Star Trek communicators.
Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2025 11:55 am