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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?
Read bad medicine and bad pharma - R&D costs of pharma are minor percentage of their total expenses. They spend more on marketing than R&D
1st - remove patents. The whole point of a patent is to share the secret sauce so it is not lost, but lately patents don't share the secret sauce (most glaringly in software patents). They can't hide the molecule - and their competitors can figure out synthesis of their own. Since they will have an edge with internal knowledge they will have competitive advantage initially and if they keep their margins sane - there probably won't be incentive for the others to invest the capital to figure out how to produce the thing and set up a supply chain.
2nd - extend patents and order maximum margin over the production cost. If they have 5times longer period to recoup the investment their books may be balanced.
3rd - change the procurement procedure. For society wide needed drugs - Uncle Sam (with pitches from EU) grants the players some money to do R&D, offers generous prepurchase and prize grants for the winner, and ends owning the patent - afterwards the pharma companies can manufacture wherever they like and compete with generics. Something similar was done with covid and no matter what your opinion on vaccination was - it worked in delivering multiple safe-ish working products in record time
Yup, I have sympathy w/ pharma companies over R&D costs. I don't have sympathy for all the TV, magazine, and online commercials they run. The only downside is we might have a flood of unemployed attractive, moderately intelligent women from various sororities around the country if pharma has less marketing dollars.
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