RiverDog wrote:Drug companies are the largest sponsors of medical research at colleges and universities in the United States:
https://thevaccinereaction.org/2018/04/ ... u-s-today/If we take the profit motive out of the equation, those contributions will dry up, and with the government encumbered with a hugely expensive Medicare for All program, it's highly unlikely that they could support medical research. From the article above:
Universities and other academic institutions are relying more on funding from the pharmaceutical industry.3 The driving force of this reliance stems from the need for large amounts of funding that may not be available from government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
Did you read the entire article? NIH spends 31 billion versus 39 billion. There are questions of the profit motive causing conflicts of interest. High risk and high reward medicine for profit is not what may be best for people.
Do these drugs do much? For every one hundred drugs developed, maybe higher, only one every succeeds. Does this funding encourage unnecessary medical development? Maybe it does. Just because funding is occurring doesn't mean it is having a positive impact on our lives. Once again I point to the life expectancy rate which isn't substantially higher given the amount of money we spend. Is quality of life higher? I doubt it.
I would bet you every dollar I had that focusing more on diet and exercise which costs far less than drugs would save far more lives than this level of expenditure on medications. The positive correlations between a good diet and exercise is far more impactful on the overall population than drugs.
The only area where this may be contradicted is orphan drug development for diseases that affect a very small proportion of the population. Then again I'm not sure private funding by wealthy donors might not have a similar success rate. For all the money spent, most drugs fail. The few that do succeed are exorbitantly priced. Do we have too much medical development reaching for the golden goose causing drugs to cost far more than they would in a more efficient, less profit driven system.
You're listing money spent without listing success rates of drug development. So much money gets tossed at medicine to what effect? Are we living better than other nations? Are the medicines we take curing us or curing one symptom only to cause three more that require more drugs?
No, it's not fair for us to pay for the high cost of drugs while citizens in other countries get the same medicine much cheaper. As I've said, they're sponging off drugs that are procured in this country via the high prices we pay for new and experimental drugs and procedures. But it is what it is. The alternative is going to a single payer system and not doing the research at all and have drug companies just provide us with generic products.
There are lots of ways to reduce your drug costs. As I've indicated, my wife has both MS and rheumatoid arthritis, so she's on 6 or 7 different drugs, some that appear very expensive at first glance. But we've found huge price differences between various pharmacies. One drug, with my wife's Medicare Part D insurance, was available at Walmart for over $100. She called around and got the same drug at Costco for less than $10 w/o going through insurance. The GoodRX cards available in most doctors offices and over the internet provide for some large discounts. Most drug companies have programs that will subsidize the cost of some drugs for low income people but you have to apply to get their lower price. The problem is that most people either aren't aware of the different prices or don't go to the trouble to shop around. Another problem is that those that live in someplace like Ritzville don't have dozens of pharmacies they can buy from.
GoodRX and similar services are a big help if the pharmacy uses them.
I still don't know. Sometimes it seems like drug development is a lot of snakeoil with some gems. Some of the drug efficacy rates are so low as to provide a marginal chance of life improvement. Sometimes the cost is everything that person has. When you're selling someone even the smallest chance of survival, they make some bad emotionally driven decisions. I wonder if we can come up with a more efficient, better managed system than encouraging this amount of snake oil for a few good medicines.
Ever since I started investing in biotech and drugs, I've seen so much rotten behavior, failure, and tons of money tossed around hoping for one perhaps useful drug they can charge some person their life savings to give them a shot at a better life. I feel we might have accomplished the same level of efficacy for less money. Our military is a great example of a socialized system that still draws investment from private industry even though they don't have the same money to spend were they private. It seems maybe we could do the same with medicine without having as much snake oil money going around.
Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2019 7:16 pm
