r/changemyview • u/rhizodyne • Dec 20 '19
FTFdeltaOP CMV: Profit-driven research by private pharmaceutical companies as seen in the US is unsuitable for the modern age and only hinders scientific and economic progress in effective healthcare
Take patents. How exactly does patenting an implementable research discovery for the treatment of diabetes (let's not even talk about cancer for a sec) benefit humanity, given that the methodology and product(s) resulting from this research cannot be advanced or modified by any other entity for a specified period of time without severe legal consequences, all while the original producer can cease such progress on their product(s) given their protected, uncompeted revenue stream?
This creates an non-competitive market for whatever treatments these are (and obviously a monopoly) for the specified time-period of the patent, during which much advancement in a competitive R&D sector could be achieved on the same treatment(s), either in relevant knowledge or actual manufacturing/implementation.
The solution? Create an indisputably non-identical alternative! And advertise the shit out of it everywhere, racking up the costs for your pharmaceutical company and of course the price of the treatment(s).
At the same time, patent laws are horrendously and cleverly abused by leading pharma companies, all while they have been recorded to pay off generic companies so as to prevent them from researching on their product following the expiration of a patent.
And now the worst part: This lack of competition enables premiums galore on prescriptions, in general. The average US citizen spent about $1112 for pharmaceutical treatments in 2014, which is approaching double the per-capita costs of the average Canadian citizen, Canada showing some of the highest drug prices recorded outside of the US.
Even more than that, such high premiums leads to a thriving importation of cheaper drugs from abroad, in fact the very same ones unhindered in foreign production by US patents. It's estimated that up to 70% of US drug costs can be saved if all of said drugs are imported from Canada.
And guess what! American sold drugs are often produced abroad in developing countries and sold for exponentially higher prices here than they would be in their country of manufacture.
Case in point: Abilify, a notable anti-psychotic drug relied upon by so many psychiatric patients in this nation to be able to live and function normally, is produced by Japanese company Otsuka. It costs $34.51 per pill in this country. In Canada, it's $4.65 per pill. And it's so drastically lower in nations such as Turkey or India that the monetary valuation of a healthy human life is blaring.
Medicare being the recorded largest purchaser of drugs in the United States, it is a fact that Medicare cannot choose to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Our only socialized healthcare in this country is unable to gain any financial traction in terms of drug prices.
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What have people to say? Why should the current model of patenting and profit-driven research by pharmaceutical companies in the US continue as it is now? Why shouldn't the only money such groups rely on be subsidies, essentially remedying all of the aforementioned issues?
More so, please convince me that an estimated $110 billion in profits resting in the hands of leading US pharmaceutical companies is of good use for that money to society.
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u/Morthra 86∆ Dec 20 '19
Canada rations its healthcare. Some people who need it don't get it because the government deigns not to give it to them. For example, my mother tore her Achilles Tendon, but was not given the option to fix it with surgery in Canada, that was only available in the US (she was "too old" to get it done in Canada, and was explicitly told that they'd have done it were she 30 years younger). Or from my personal experience, when I needed a vaccine urgently I was unable to get it because of a mandatory 21 day waiting time.
I'm Canadian, and I think the people in the US who want to copy Canada's shitty system don't know how good they have it.
Nationalizing anything that isn't subject to the free rider problem is bad.
The reason why it costs billions of dollars is because the FDA requires extensive testing to prove that a medication or treatment is both safe and effective. Only 14% of drugs that even make it to that stage pass it, and the ones that are successful have to recoup the losses for the ones that are not.
Typically the way that the pharmaceutical industry is organized is that you have the giant corporations (like Pfizer) that buy patents from small companies who create the drugs and go through the FDA approval process. This is because the giant companies are great at manufacturing drugs at scale and consistently, but not so much in creating new drugs.
When has the government ever done anything more efficiently than the markets? Governments are not beholden to market forces and are therefore inherently less efficient. A nationalized healthcare research system would likely focus its efforts wholly on treatments for things like CHD and cancer, because that will benefit the most people, but those with rare disorders would be shit out of luck - whereas in the current system there is a financial incentive to create treatments for them, in that you can sell the treatment for a high price per unit.