Seems to me that drugs demand high prices because it costs a hell of a lot to research them... ...unless you pinch someone else's research, of course, in which case they won't make the money to research their next drug, which means Professor Shaunak and co will have to come up with £400 million or so next time... which means that they will have to charge high prices, and bitch about the undercutters who reverse engineer their stuff. I'm not sure about the patent law... if someone makes an improvement to an existing patented design, can they patent the new design, or just the improvements to it?
If the giant pharmaceutical companies charged a reasonable amount for their drugs so that everybody could afford them, then everybody would use them and they could still make their huge profits, only maybe in a slightly longer time frame. Look at it this way, if movie A cost 200 million to produce and movie B cost 10 million, it doesn't mean that the theatre will charge the consumer more or less for their ticket according to the production cost, the movie will fall or stand according to its success and popularity. The same reasoning can be applied to music CD's, they all cost a similar price whether they were made in a top notch proffessional studio or whether made in the guy's bedroom. The same reasoning should apply even more so to life-saving drugs.
...and new drugs would still be made, only in a slightly longer time frame. How do you decide what is a "reasonable amount", anyway? To me, reasonable means enough that research into new medicines is encouraged.
What reasoning? The purpose of charging the same per head price for movie tickets and new-release CDs and DVDs is essentially to gauge their popularity. The price quickly adjusts if they don't sell.
Ironically most of their money doesn't go into research. Profit margins on expensive drugs are higher. It would be silly to research cheap drugs for them. Or to market them. I had this business idea once (i can't go into details) that would entail finding a cheap cure to a certain disease. Needless to say that to do this you have to change your aims from being a big pharmaceutical company to just finding a cheap cure. I can assure you it is theoretically possible. But who is going to back you up? Start up costs will be high, and profits not astronomical as with the pharmaceutical companies. It might brake even, or a small profit, but you help a lot of people. But helping people isn't really a goal of modern society anymore. Just making a profit.
This is nothing new – drug companies routinely try to slightly modify drugs that have been patented by other companies in the hopes of creating a “new” drug that has the same effect but isn’t covered by the other company’s patent. It’s referred to in the industry as “patent bashing”. This article is presenting it like this is some sort of new idea that these guys had, but it’s been a common industry practice for decades.
This is DISASTEROUS. Beyond words. For two main reasons (and a host of smaller ones): 1. Profits are the only thing that keep research money flowing, which dramatically improves our medicines. 2. This will make drugs cheaper, thereby compounding the population problem.
100,000 people spend $100 a week on their new wonder drug = $10,000,000 pw. 2,000,000 people spend $10 a week for the same drug = $20,000,000 Difference? Turnover is doubled, profits are probably higher or the same at worst, and millions of people benefit from a better quality of life, or even life itself. Where is the F'n problem?
Like I said, this has been going on for a long time. Companies big and small do it all the time, and the drug industry seems to get by. There are pros and cons to the practice. It does make drugs cheaper, because when more than one company offer drugs that are substantially similar you get competition and prices drop. Also, they sometimes manage to actually improve the drug. On the other hand, all the time that companies spend trying to copy-cat existing drugs is time that isn't spent trying to actually create new drugs. So it's nice if you're the person getting to choose between similar competing drugs, but it sucks if you're the person who can't get any drugs to treat your condition because the companies were busy trying to copy each other instead of invent a new drug to treat your problem. It's not that simple. If the drug companies could make even more money by making their drugs cost less, don't you think they would do it??? They're hardly stupid. In practice what usually happens is that almost everyone who need a drug will pay almost anything for it, or the government will pay for it - there are very few people who will need a drug but not buy it because it costs too much. Since everyone who could benefit from the drug is already taking it, lowering the price usually just means that the same number of customers all pay less money.
