So, Hep C cured.

Noodleface_sl said:

white people's fear of black people

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We all know that's never happening. You are just trolling us!

So 84k per American is a fair price, but getting the treatment into the high hundreds / low thousands range for the developing world is still profitable. Hm.

Gilead is really greedy to make their cost of pills this high. Most people will have to use the patient assistance programs to even get this treatment. Well, at least it's better than getting cirrhosis. :\

If you don't want to pay that much for a complete cure for one of the few remaining, one of the most serious, (previously) untreatable communicable disease to mankind, feel free to die instead

An amazing triumph of science and you American Inventors find a reason to complain about it

Kuriin_sl said:

Gilead is really greedy to make their cost of pills this high. Most people will have to use the patient assistance programs to even get this treatment. Well, at least it's better than getting cirrhosis. :\

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The universe where companies blow billions after billions on R&D that doesn't ultimately pan out, then when they finally find something useful decide to charge what you call "fair", does not exist. There is a universe where miracle cures are cheap and never discovered because there is no financial incentive to find them, and a universe where new cures are insanely expensive then become cheap 20 years later. Which one would you like to live in?

Son, I've worked in pharmaceuticals, in a company with one of the harshest drugs for Hepatitis C (Peginterferon alfa-2a), and it is about $1200/month. You are saying it is OK to charge someone $80,000 for a drug that willNOTwork by itself for genotype 1, which requires the assistance of a booster (Ribavirin) and either a protease inhibitor (Bocepavir or Tolepravir) or the dreaded interferon. All of these combined are NO WHERE near the cost of cancer drugs, but it is still very high.

Add to the fact that Gilead is acting very greedy in that they will NOT collaborate with Bristol-Myer on their HepC drug, that when in combination, has a nearly 100% cure rate on even the toughest genotypes. Do they want that? Nope.

I would love to see a reputable citation of a drug company spending 'billions and billions' on R&D and getting nothing in return. Someone listens to the radio and TV too much. There's no such thing as zero return on on investment in the world of pharmaceuticals. There's no dead ends, only new avenues of research.

This coming from someone that's supposedly in a top-flight psych program? Scary.

Shit like this is why you see big pharma commercials that tell you big pharma is not evil.

Nobody's saying they should be NPO's. But this is exploitative. That's what "we were trying to find a fair price", the direct quote from the guys you're defending, that's what that quote MEANS. That's what he's saying and he's not being subtle about it. "We were trying to decide how much skin we have to leave on the mark before pitchfork laden villagers show up at our door".

In 50 years it won't matter so much. It'll be an all new set of assholes. So get in your TARDIS and tell us how the future is.

It's like when the BP guy said that the oil spill was terribly inconvienent. Sometimes these guys fuck up and actually say what they mean.

Kuriin, again, the universe you wish for does not exist. There is a universe (ours) where a cured for hep c is found and costs $80k for 20 years until generics enter the market, and there is a universe where new drugs are cheap and never found. Those are your only options

TheBeagle_sl said:

I would love to see a reputable citation of a drug company spending 'billions and billions' on R&D and getting nothing in return. Someone listens to the radio and TV too much. There's no such thing as zero return on on investment in the world of pharmaceuticals. There's no dead ends, only new avenues of research.

This coming from someone that's supposedly in a top-flight psych program? Scary.

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Lol nice dig there at the end. We're so angry here on the internet. I thought it was common knowledge that most drugs are a bust. There's a reason they have to go through so many clinical trials. Those are insanely expensive.

Look, drug parents last 20, sometimes 25 years iirc. Its not like they set the price and then everyone who can't afford it dies forever. Its 20 years of squeezing sick people to make most of their money, then it's hookers and blow for everyone else. 20 year waiting period for poor people to CURE MOTHERFUCKING HEP C? Let's be reasonable human beings here. Drug companies have to make money on their investments. Could they afford to charge a little less? I'm not the CFO of any of these companies and neither are you, but its probably safe to say yes, they could. But they're also a company whose goal is to ultimately make as much money as possible. That goal, which everyone likes to call evil, is also responsible for the discovery of the drug. The world is not black and white. Things are not all good or bad.

This pretty much sums you guys up, notably around 2:15:
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Membe...-ck-technology

Most of the pharmas don't even research anymore because of not wanting to deal with it. You don't see Pfizer doing much shit anymore.

Patents last about 20 years. And lets be perfectly clear on this: several drugs, most of them in fact, have multiple indications on them allowing more people to buy them. Drug companies make MILLIONS, and even BILLIONS more in sales than they do in R&D. The pipeline is not as bad as you think, Dabamf.

This is also not the first time Gilead as decided to make their drugs expensive, to the point of pushing a lot of people out. The AIDS Foundation has commonly criticized Gilead's cost/pill for their HIV drugs (Complera, Sofusobivir, and Stribild).

In a year, won't we be able to order some generics from India for $30?

I have no problem with drug companies making money, but I do have an issue with what amounts to a monopoly on it, especially considering what a huge world-wide potential this has. What if Polio vaccines costs the equivalent of 100K back in the day? That shit would still be running rampant now (on the plus side there probably wouldn't be anyone alive in third world countries, either).

I'd be fine with looking at their balance sheet for this project and setting a reasonable profit margin for distribution (with allowances for R&D and average cost of failed potential drugs). This, to me anyway, is one of those time where the public good is paramount. The guy in the article comes off as a total prick, who basically spun "we get to charge whatever we want, bitches" to a slightly less dickish "we chose a price people would pay".

Since insurance companies are the ones who are going to have to pay for it, it's just a huge money grab from the system. Business as usual in pharma, and really sheds light on one of the big problems we have with our huge healthcare costs.

Except that it's so new, it will be on the non-formulary list for prescription lists that the insurance will require PegIntron/Pegasys and Ribavirin. The same thing happened with Incivek and Victrelis.

BoldW_sl said:

In a year, won't we be able to order some generics from India for $30?

I have no problem with drug companies making money, but I do have an issue with what amounts to a monopoly on it, especially considering what a huge world-wide potential this has. What if Polio vaccines costs the equivalent of 100K back in the day? That shit would still be running rampant now (on the plus side there probably wouldn't be anyone alive in third world countries, either).

I'd be fine with looking at their balance sheet for this project and setting a reasonable profit margin for distribution (with allowances for R&D and average cost of failed potential drugs). This, to me anyway, is one of those time where the public good is paramount. The guy in the article comes off as a total prick, who basically spun "we get to charge whatever we want, bitches" to a slightly less dickish "we chose a price people would pay".

Since insurance companies are the ones who are going to have to pay for it, it's just a huge money grab from the system. Business as usual in pharma, and really sheds light on one of the big problems we have with our huge healthcare costs.

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Bestill my beating heart! Aren't you a hardcore Republican around these parts, doing your part to fight the righteous fight against evil socialism? Not that I'm complaining, but this really caught me by surprise.

BoldW_sl said:

I have no problem with drug companies making money, but I do have an issue with what amounts to a monopoly on it, especially considering what a huge world-wide potential this has. What if Polio vaccines costs the equivalent of 100K back in the day? That shit would still be running rampant now (on the plus side there probably wouldn't be anyone alive in third world countries, either).

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They probably would've started hanging Pharma execs from trees and burning their homes to the ground.

OneofOne_sl said:

Bestill my beating heart! Aren't you a hardcore Republican around these parts, doing your part to fight the righteous fight against evil socialism? Not that I'm complaining, but this really caught me by surprise.

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Compared to the majority of posters in this thread (and my argumentative nature), one may consider me conservative. But arbitrary pricing while holding a monopoly on a product isn't a workable capitalistic model either - never mind the actual societal value of such a breakthrough.

We have established the price is bellow the cost of the alternatives. So social and economic benefits even at price of 84k is not in question.

So what is the issue here that patents give a limited monopoly? Or that some people will make a fucking huge amount of money off this drug and that a given once because it will save the country overall fucking huge'er amounts of money by curing 90% of Hep C patients of the disease?

Having a monopoly on TVs or automobiles is not the same thing as having monopolies on life-saving drugs. That capitalists such as yourself can justify greed over saving lives is incomprehensible to me. There is MORE than enough give at $1000 a pill for them to recoup their investment (of buying the company who actually came up with the drug - a price that was already bloated because of allowing monopolies to exist) and turning a respectable profit. It never ceases to amaze me that people like yourself think 1) that humans ONLY work to get rich and 2) that if people only have the possibility to makes tens of millions in profits instead of billions, well shit, why would they bother?