Medical Cost
Burncycle
Join Date: 2002-11-24 Member: 9759Members, NS1 Playtester
Join Date: 2002-11-24 Member: 9759Members, NS1 Playtester
in Discussions
Brazil is essentially saying
"The people are dying of aids, and you are over-charging for your medicine because they have no other option. We want you to reduce the cost of the medicine and make more of it."
The medicine companies are saying "Sit on it and rotate."
And brazil responds:
"Ok, we'll nationalize the factories, produce it ourselves, and you won't get a freaking dime."
Medicine companies: "You can't do that!"
Brazilian government:
"Watch us."
Medicine companies: "Er, can we talk this over?"
I kind of agree with that. If it costs .05 to make a pill, and they charge $2.00 per pill, to me that's not only price fixing, but unfair. People are dying, and the companies are charging the highest price they can get away with. If you don't pay our prices, you die. Simple as that. And that's messed up IMO. In addition, some companies simply don't make medicine for some of the rare ailments. It's rare- they don't get a profit. But that means if the medicine is available at all, it's tremendously expensive. Rather than coming up with hair brained government schemes to allow poor folks to get medicine, shouldn't they try another route?
Don't get me wrong, medicine companies are in it for the profit. They want and need to make money to continue running. Costs go to administration, building the facilities to produce, and research and development, but the end result is you have to be upper middle class or better to get what you need. But should there be a _cap_ as to how much higher they can overcharge?
"The people are dying of aids, and you are over-charging for your medicine because they have no other option. We want you to reduce the cost of the medicine and make more of it."
The medicine companies are saying "Sit on it and rotate."
And brazil responds:
"Ok, we'll nationalize the factories, produce it ourselves, and you won't get a freaking dime."
Medicine companies: "You can't do that!"
Brazilian government:
"Watch us."
Medicine companies: "Er, can we talk this over?"
I kind of agree with that. If it costs .05 to make a pill, and they charge $2.00 per pill, to me that's not only price fixing, but unfair. People are dying, and the companies are charging the highest price they can get away with. If you don't pay our prices, you die. Simple as that. And that's messed up IMO. In addition, some companies simply don't make medicine for some of the rare ailments. It's rare- they don't get a profit. But that means if the medicine is available at all, it's tremendously expensive. Rather than coming up with hair brained government schemes to allow poor folks to get medicine, shouldn't they try another route?
Don't get me wrong, medicine companies are in it for the profit. They want and need to make money to continue running. Costs go to administration, building the facilities to produce, and research and development, but the end result is you have to be upper middle class or better to get what you need. But should there be a _cap_ as to how much higher they can overcharge?
Comments
I'm not saying to keep unreasonable prices, but if they ever did this out of the goodwill of their hearts, they would be dooming future recipients because they would never make any breakthroughs.
Nanotechnology is the most feasible cure, but methods of creating nanomeds, and targeting toxins and diseases is still difficult. So far there's been a nanotech method for taking out toxins like anthrax in a persons body using magnetized nanomeds to latch on to the toxins, then later have them taken out using a magnetized tube.
Right now, profits are progress, and while they should make it reasonable, you can't bring up the case of production costs vs. consumer cost.
Its very messy. <!--emo&???--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/confused.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='confused.gif'><!--endemo-->
Not cool.
Simply put, people have stuffed themselves into this sort of postion.
Aye, that's how it should be: nobody should be without basic health care, despite their social standing.
Let's get two things straight: the costs of developing a new medicine are far far more than it costs to manufacture them in most cases. Even just the animal then human testing costs millions of dollars. It pretty much equates to the video game and music cd businesses: very low duplication costs but high initial costs. Patents in some form are needed here, because there would be no point in investing millions with the hope of making a profit if somebody if you'll never make it back (since somebody stole the research and started making a generic right away). The current US patent system is half decent for medicine, but the time before it becomes in the public domain is still a bit long I'd say (I think 17 years).
Second, like most mega-corporations, pharm giants are both greedy and dumb. Simple being huge gives your employees, (particularly your management, marketing, and legal staff) plenty of opportunities to rip off the company. It's simply not possible to babysit them all. However, plenty of companies take it beyond the point where they should: they pay upper management millions of dollars a year more than they are worth, for instance, and it's hard to not notice that number in the payroll. There's your dumbness for you. Now, to make up for all this wasted capital, they have to take it from somebody else: either the customers or the government. Whenever they can, they do both. They don't really have any reason to do anything but maximize their profits, and very little incentive to care about their customers. Greedy.
Some things about market capitalism just don't scale well...