The Glade 4.0

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.html?hpt=T2

I won't quote the whole article here, as it's fairly long, but the gist is that health care giants are now allowed to engage in massive fraud without penalty. Why? Because a company convicted of a major fraud is statutorily excluded from receiving Medicare/Medicaid dollars. Since this is a death sentence for any drug company, "too big to fail" means the government admits they cannot be prosecuted.

This sort of thing is to be expected when government gets large enough to interpret itself having some sort of stake in any private industry.

Is anyone really surprised here?

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I'm a little surprised that fraud is the same as killing people.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Hey I work for Pfizer! Until likely sometime in May (because I used to work for Wyeth until Pfizer gobbled them up). Gotta say Wyeth was the most friendly large corporation that felt like a small company I've ever worked for.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I understand your reasoning, but you have to admit that it does leave room for the possibility.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

It does. However, the possibility of someone dieing as a third, fourth, or farther-order effect is not at all the same as killing them directly. If the title were accurate, Pfizer could hire hitmen to kill people then go "but we're too big to fail!".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not that I think the FDA is a legitimate entity that achieves any of it's stated goals anyway,but the one role that particular agency could have that would be a legitimate function (examining and procecuting cases of fraud) they just failed at miserably.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Someone has to examine and grant the government-sanctioned monopoly on new drugs and techniques, or there is no medical research.

...

You have a moral issue with patenting pharmaceuticals?


Also, we're surprised that a company helmed by a member of the board of the Federal Reserve gets a pass?

Get real.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

No, I don't have a problem with patenting drugs. I'm just pointing out exactly what it is, it is a government-sanctioned monopoly. What else could you call it? I phrased it that way because we've got a lot of posters that say it's always bad when the government meddles in the market, and this is a clear case where it isn't. Someone has to handle the procedures and rules for the monopoly, which is one reason the FDA is needed.

How is there a monopoly? There's more than one drug producing company.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

When you patent a drug, you get 20 years where no one else is allowed to sell that drug. If this drug is life saving, you can pretty much just make up any price you want because hospitals are required to pay you whatever you ask if they have a patient that needs this drug to live.

One, "the procedures and rules for the monopoly" are handled by Patent Law, not the FDA.
Two, you show in your next post why it is yet another case where gov't meddling is bad, contrary to your statement of it being a "clear case where it isn't" .

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Actually, from the point of patent, it's an average of 12 years from when the drug is made to the point at which it passes FDA approval, making about 8 years on the open market.

Not only that, but the subsequent companies would have next to no cost, as the current FDA regulations require them to do little to no testing (the major cost of making a drug), as they can simply tag along on the coattails of the original manufacturer.

But year, it's nothing near 20 years from the point at which the drug is approved for use.

And even with that, most drug companies have tiny profit margins.

The average cost of developing a single drug is around $800 million and 15 years, and those figures stem from studies in 2004 or so. Now it's closer to 1.2 billion. Per drug. With an average 15 year development process, and 20 year patents, most drugs only have 5-8 years to make back the entire cost of their production.

If the drug is only going to be used in a few candidates, the price has to be much higher to make that money back.

There is a distinct argument that has been around for a while that extending patent periods would significantly reduce the cost of most medicines, as the companies could stand to lower the prices and still make back their bottom line.

Either that, or allow them to come on the market in an 'experimental' category earlier, without the huge sums of money the FDA sucks out of them in testing/licensing. I want to say it's around 10,000-12,000 pages of reports that have to initially be submitted to the FDA, detailing every portion of the process at hand, followed by 5-7 years of testing.

With that process, only approximately 13 new drugs were licensed by the FDA in 2002, and the number has continued to decline since.

And most of them were for high grossing products, like erectile dysfunction, migraines, allergies, etc- with the current system, there just isn't a huge benefit towards developing actual cures to things.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Oh, and since when are patents considered a monopoly?

I've not heard that in any other area of study.

Do you consider all patents to be monopolies?

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Nephyr: But, it's not FAIR for them to charge so much when people NEED those drugs to LIVE.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Sarcasm noted, but:

This is why I support the heavy use of an 'experimental phase' by the FDA.

The drugs can be 'sold' low cost, or even for free, and used as an early stage IIIb clinical trial.

But then, if the FDA would allow things like, say, the creation of drugs that can only be used in certain genetic pools (ie, for Caucasian use, Mediterranean descent, etc), the number of drugs available to treat most disorders would shoot through the roof, and we wouldn't have so many people who don't have treatments available.

Most drugs that get pulled for side effects can be shown to only have those side effects in specific genetic pools- or only NOT have side effects in specific genetic pools. Let people use them, with dire warnings- it's their choice what they choose to ingest, not some government watchdog.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I'm not sure it was sarcasm as much as cynicism. You're basically arguing uphill against people too **** stupid or entitled to give a **** about your "logic" or your "companies need to make their money make" statements.

These people out there, who believe fairness is a highly important factor in drug/pharma policy, would be very likely to say that new drugs should have capped prices, because these pharma companies make "too much money." They'd advocate this way before they'd listen to you, because your solution isn't fair, it's logical.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I support the nonexistence of the FDA.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

...what? Drug companies have immense profit margins, ranging from 16 to 24 percent. (Don't want to take my word for it? Just google "pharmaceutical company profit margins" and look at the top 10 results) Compared to the "evil" insurance companies and their 3-5 percent margins, they're making a killing.



Yes. If you have total control over the availability and price of a particular product or service, you have a monopoly on it. Again, I don't think drug patents are bad. But there's a serious problem when a bottle of pills that costs $80 here can be had for $5 in South America.

Now you're going into the realm of generics which is essentially what I do.

The original drug is always more expensive because it has the attached research. Lets take aspirin for example, the first company who made it might have spent 500mil on research. The first company to make a generic once it comes off the patent would have spent 100k on registration.

As much as companies want to tell you generics are exactly the same as the original, they are not.

All meds have 2 parts, actives and excipients. Actives are the bits which actually do something in your body, excipients are the bits that dont but is needed to hold the tablet together, colouring, or part of the delivery system. While actives are public knowledge, excipients are not, and thus generics are forced to come up with their own through research and development. Most of the time this is not as good as the original. (remember i'm talking about the first generics, this process does get more refined as time goes by, but the first wave of generics is about timing and not always quality).

Now if you're talking about the same brand, under patent, selling for different prices. I'd say it's either off the back of a truck, or an imitation. I don't know of any company who would do that to their own bottom line.

I know about the research costs. The problem is most other countries price-fix their drug prices, only allowing a thin profit margin above production costs. So yes, you get the brand name for $5 in Brazil, because Brazil's government tells them they can't sell for more than $5. $5 is more than the production costs so there's no good reason for them to not to sell there, the research has already been done and paid for by US consumers. Might as well make a little profit. Because of this, the US ends up paying for the entire world's medical research because it's virtually the only country where drugs aren't price controlled.

As far as I'm aware the drugs here aren't controlled, they are subsidised. The government pays for a portion of it so the consumer only sees a reduced price. I'm pretty sure thats similar for both the EU and canada...

As far as I know, the Australian public insurance system only subsidizes generic drugs, if you want a brand name you have to pay for almost all of it yourself. In the EU, a lot of countries actually fix drug prices to the local cost of living, leaving virtually no money for research. And in the EU countries that don't price fix, they still can't make money because the EU is one economic zone, so people just import them from the price-fixing countries.

Which might be true if there were only one way to make a drug for any given condition. For most common conditions however, there's more than one way to formulate a treatment for that. A patent doesn't give you 20 years where only you can make cholesterol meds; it gives you 20 years where only you can make the one you patented.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."