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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Conversation has been slow here. I feel like the standards have increased to the point where people are afraid to post (except of course for bad faith posters who don't care).

So, let me try a post that's more of a conversation starter and less of a PhD thesis.

According to Bernie Sanders, it costs about $5 to make a monthly dose of Ozempic, the blockbuster-weight loss drug. Americans pay about $1000/month. Canadians pay $155. Germans pay $59.

The stock of the company which makes the drug, Novo Nordisk, has doubled since the beginning of 2023. (I considered buying in 2022 but didn't because I thought I was already too late 💀) It now has a market cap of nearly $600 billion, making it the most valuable company in Europe.

I assume that if companies were forced to charge the same price in U.S. as they do in Europe, the global pharma industry would become insolvent.

So why is the United States paying for > 100% of global pharma research? And how can we fix the glitch?

I feel like the standards have increased to the point where people are afraid to post

looks at three previous top level posts Two deserved to get pruned, and two top level posts in an hour is a bit dodgy.

I do kind of miss the bare links thread, since I mostly get my news from here, though I realize that's my own fault.

So why is the United States paying for > 100% of global pharma research? And how can we fix the glitch?

I would potentially be open to a regulation that companies can't sell drugs to Americans at a higher cost than they sell them to Germans, though there's probably some reason why that wouldn't work. Even in America, it'll be worth having in the long run, so I wouldn't want to discourage the process entirely.

Seems like the simplest solution would just be to stop making it illegal to buy drugs from abroad. Then if drug companies tried to jack up prices in the US we'd just buy them from the Germans for a much smaller markup. I didn't have insurance coverage in college and ordered a drug I needed from a sketchy online pharmacy in Canada for around 1/4 the price that I would pay in the US. The disadvantage was the risk that it would get stopped at customs and confiscated, but that's an entirely self inflicted problem.

I wonder if countries like Canada or Germany would even allow that on their end, since it would probably mess up their own deals with the drug companies to be selling openly to Americans?

They absolutely don’t want it because yes, it will leave the pharma companies (many of which have large operations in Europe) with no choice but to substantially raise costs for their healthcare systems.

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