RiverDog wrote:It's not just the R&D costs of that one specific drug. Companies experiment with thousands of drugs, most of which never make it through the USDA approval process. The successful ones that do make it to market have to make up the R&D costs for all those that failed:
Nine of every ten new drugs fail in clinical testing. According to consultant Cheryl Barton, a drug in phase III testing has 32% chance of failure. Only 21% of drugs that enter phase I testing ever make it to market [1]. Even in Phase I, 37% fail. Most drugs fail in phase II. (Goodman and Gilman estimate the success rate in the three phases to be 50%, 30% and 25-50%, or an overall success rate of between one in 13 and one in 26). The percentage of drugs for neurological diseases that fail is even higher. For example, over 200 drug candidates for Alzheimer's disease have failed so far in clinical testing.https://www.randombio.com/drug-failures.html
I will enlighten the posters that the vast majority of these drugs are unnecessary. A great deal of this is a big money grab with labs created with funding for drugs that will never see the light of day while they cash in on a various milestones regardless of the final success of the drug where the stock gets pumped and dumped into the market. I've even cashed in on a few of these milestones when a stock spiked because phase 2 or 3 clinical data looked good. Nice little profit.
Billions of dollars are paid in private grants and by the government for drug research regardless of the contribution of large pharmaceuticals whose primary agenda is not to cure or help humanity, but to drive revenue growth. They even discuss seeking new methods of revenue growth. As I stated a cure is not the best way to drive revenue and profits, not at all. In fact it's a good way to kill profits.
I would even argue that you can prove that big pharma encourages the creation of new sicknesses including funding questionable research for drugs like anti-depressants, health supplements, and other medical drugs, processes, and devices that have no place on the market including paying doctors to push more expensive drugs and procedures over equally effective less expensive outcomes. I've even noticed a manipulation of bloodwork and vital sign statistics to further encourage doctors to get people within the listed numbers regardless of how many drugs they have to put you on to do it such as cholesterol and blood pressure being tightened or new research on dietary cholesterol showing a poor correlation with heart disease being ignored.
For profit medicine incorporates a lot of the negative attributes of the free market and is nearly as bad as for profit war. Free market principles are great for the vast majority of goods and services, but medicine I question because just as the free market has led to many bad outcomes in various industries driven by greed and the quick buck mentality, medicine shouldn't be one of those areas open to that type of corrupt behavior. It should be focused on its overall benefit to society including for example not allowing a product or service to become standard that will lead to more bad outcomes.
I've done more research on medicine in America than anyone on this board. I don't resort to grabbing a few articles to try to make a point because the amount of information is immense. If you take time to investigate socialized medical systems to see health outcomes, you see that we are not getting better health outcomes with our expensive private system. And I've invested in more biopharmaceutical companies than anyone on this board I'd bet. I've seen how they run. This idea that we're paying for the research costs of all drugs is horsecrap.
So how about
burrton and
Riverdog go check out the balance sheets and cash balances of big pharma to see those huge cash hordes. If what you say was true about us paying for many, many, many drugs, then big pharma wouldn't be sitting on piles of cash and their margins wouldn't be as high as they are because all that cash would be spent on reinvestment in drug development. Investment in biotech is actually quite cheap. You don't need some huge company to fund drug research. It's often done by small labs and research facilities that are fairly inexpensive. Even trials start off with a small number of patients and only reach the next level when the drug show some efficacy data with no side effects, which is fairly rare. If the lab shows some promise, then they make a deal with a big pharma company or perhaps seek other private investors. Not to mention there are great tax benefits for investing in drug and medical development.
There are a lot of Big Pharma companies making money in a lot of different ways. Not all of it is quality care for a market driven cost. It's more we have you over the barrel and we're giving you a chance to live, so we'll charge as much as we can get away with. That's why you see these companies getting called to task and looking worse for having done so.
I strongly recommend anyone undecided to research the biotech industry. See what's going on. See how the process of drug development works. It's a very interesting world. Thought a lot of good does come from it, especially for orphan drugs, a great deal is very focused on profiting off human sickness including pushing new sicknesses like the giant push you've seen for anti-depressants, fat surgery and drugs, and trying to fix nearly everything with pharmaceuticals. Even the law that was passed to stop Americans from getting cheaper drugs in Canada was pushed to protect the high margins of the American drug industry because Americans can't have inexpensive medical care, too much money lost.
Posted: Tue Jul 02, 2019 7:11 am
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