Two pills to wipe out hookworm could cost you 4 cents. Or $400.
It just depends where you live.
The 4 cents is in Tanzania. That’ll cover the two pills it takes to knock out the intestinal parasite. But in the United States, where hookworm has re-emerged, the price for two 200 mg tablets of albendazole can cost as much as $400.
The pill will put an end to the problems hookworm can cause, such as anemia and protein deficiency as well as stunting growth in children.
It’s not just a problem with the anti-hookworm pill. Drugs for diseases of the developing world, in particular what are known as “neglected tropical diseases” like hookworm and leishmaniasis, are enormously more expensive in the United States than in the developing world.
“There really is no good reason for this price,” Dr. Jonathan Alpern says of the albendazole price tag. Alpern works for the HealthPartners Institute, the research division of a health care organization in Minnesota.
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chase32: The same reason a band-aid can cost $600 in a hospital. Our medical infrastructure is a cluster* of perverse incentives.
FR3DF3NST3R: If the patent has expired and the free market isn’t providing generics why doesn’t the government step in and import them?
BanMikePantsNow: We are a nation of idiots for allowing this kind of thing.
WheresTheButterAt: Does this create a darkweb market for pharma drugs? I know about all the regular drug trade but do people buy these types of medicine on the darkweb to, considering price difference?
Theyd still make insane profit selling it at 1/10th the US cost.
1111_11111_111111: Or you can order the animal version on Amazon. Not 4 cents but definitely not $400 either.
utu_: The problem is patent laws and people who think socialized healthcare is the answer are retarded.
Carinico: Elasticity of demand. Basically just because it’s most profitable to charge $400 here and $0.04 there
Harvard Study Reveals Drug Prices are High in U.S. Because Government Grants Monopoly to Big Pharma
In what can only be described as paradigm-shattering research on drug prices, the Journal of the American Medical Association has officially recognized why drug prices skyrocket in America. Big pharma is granted a monopoly by the State which effectively eliminates their competition and allows them to charge any price they want — so they do.The new paper, published on August 23, “The High Cost of
Prescription Drugs in the United States: Origins and Prospects for Reform,” set out to “review the origins and effects of high drug prices in the US market and to consider policy options that could contain the cost of prescription drugs.”
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standard_armadillo: What everyone already knew before Harvard spent a squillon dollars studying.
lolreallythou: Dirt cheap in Thailand. I walk into a hospital, get seen immediatly, get diagnosed, walk out with a bag of pills and around $30 removed from my wallet.
Without healthcare
LDLover: Yep. And look at the prices of specific drugs from the ACA on when the customer base paid for by govt expanded significantly. Prices went through the roof.
oneamungus: Big Pharma = Organized Drug Crime Syndicate!
ConspiracyAccount: Order online from Canadian pharmacies. Same stuff and much, much cheaper in many cases.
GhostOfJimLahey: We need a trade deal that makes the rest of the world bear some of the burden for the creation of these drugs. Americans get stuck paying for everything, since negotiations are done directly with foreign governments:
>There’s more to it than that, to be fair. Yet when negotiating with other governments, pharmaceutical companies operate at a severe disadvantage, not because the governments’ buying power is so vast (the national health-care systems of Canada and many European countries cover fewer people than Aetna), but because the people you’re negotiating with can change the rules under which your product gets sold. At any point they can say, like Lord Vader, “I am altering the deal. Pray that I do not alter it any further.”
>This imbalance can certainly be perceived as other countries’ freeloading, Kolassa, a former director of pricing and economic policy at the drug company Sandoz, said. He recalled negotiating drug prices with foreign governments, some of whom refused outright to buy certain drugs if they were priced too high, even if doing so reduced contributions to R&D. “They knew the U.S. would cover it,” he said.
http://www.ibtimes.com/how-us-subsidizes-cheap-drugs-europe-2112662
A trade deal is the only thing that will stop the “fuck it, America will just pay for it.” attitude the rest of the world has.
PromptCritical725: The constitution empowers the government to provide temporary monopoly status for innovators. It’s called a patent. Further, the FDA requires extensive and expensive testing and approval processes for new drugs. This makes getting a new drug to market so expensive only decently sized pharma companies can even afford it.
So, put the two together and you have “Government grants monopoly rights to big pharmaceuticals”.
onetimerone: Even at the county level if you have money to give to politicians you can sway their decisions. My ex boss bankrolled a candidate for Sheriff and ended up with a deputy chief appointment with no prior training. This guy probably never even fired a BB gun in his life, money corrupts everything.
ak235: US patients pay full freight on drugs other countries refuse to. Other countries get a free ride basically. Of course the US could simply refuse to pay in the same way and then the drug companies would shrink R&D and…less drugs. Would be their argument.
Rest of the world also does this with their militaries. Europe has basically no credible fighting forces because it has outsourced its security to the US by default.
RPmatrix: They needed a Harvard study to figure that out?! Never underestimate TPTB!
jimbean66: Yeah well it’s also the reason most new drugs are developed in the US.
dabzilla_710: Nothing a lil deregulation can’t fix.
flatchampagne: Of course they do, the government doesn’t give a f*** if people can’t afford healthcare as long as they are fine
Sloth859: That and the cost of getting a drug approved. That takes quite a long commitment, and a lot of bribery.
Skysweep: The Rothschild dynasty must continue!..
FlacOrGtfo: Just look at Jazz Pharmaceutical’s patent and monopoly on Xyrem. Xyrem is pharmaceutical GHB that is prescribed to people with narcolepsy so they can sleep. (It works, I would know) The prescription was about $16,000 in 2015 and is currently about $10,000.
SC2sam: It’s absolutely true. The entire IP law that we have has been abused and manipulated to become entirely counter productive to the nation as a whole. You can thank Disney for a massive part of that as their constant lobbying efforts has dwindled and destroyed the original purpose for IP protection. These companies NEED to be broken up into much smaller companies and overall patent/copyright/trademark etc… protections need to be drastically changed to encourage the creation of new content, prevent the stagnation of technology, and to decrease the prices of protected products.
IP law is a good concept but it’s lacking a control on prices charged for content because it removes the free market influence on what price could be charged. The law should be setup so that if a company is asking for a government monopoly on a product/technology etc… then the government should implement a absolute maximum that could be charged to the customer for said product. Without that protection of customers then companies have no motivation to actually improve or create the best possible product.
The only problem with breaking up of these mega corporations is that their control over the market is still a valuable negotiating tool due to their influence into other nations economies. China for example already dominates many aspects of the global market and the removal of US backed mega corporations would effectively hand control entirely over to china which would be extremely detrimental to everyone except china considering they are in general a very horrible economic partner thanks to their policy of almost entirely one sided agreements and trade.
That being said though it would still be a great boon to the nation in both it’s redevelopment and the overall happiness of it’s citizens if we were to break up all the monopolies. Overall it would mean a vast improvement of products, increase in pay for workers, decrease in prices across the board, and a massive increase in tax revenue which would allow the country to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.
_callingUout_: Link to actual study?
olegreggg: This is common knowledge
skekze: and now they want to give cannabis to them too. So science is a good thing, but when it’s master is money, it just takes away your rights to self administer your own low cost solution to a health problem. They gonna decide what you can eat next?
goldmanstackss: But I thought it was because Trump was repealing the ACA???
Dr_Diabeeto: This is because companies spend hundreds of millions to research the drugs and make sure they’re not going to kill the people they’re giving them to. Just to *apply* for an FDA new drug application is literally millions of dollars.
The government then grants the company that did the research a 10-year patent on that drug to recoup their cost of research. This helps pay study participants, researchers, and medical doctors/pharmacists for their time. The entire reason generic drugs are cheaper is that they don’t have to do any of the research, they just have production costs. The generic companies still usually mark their drugs up 200-500% for resell as well.
It is a conspiracy, but it keeps the lights on so important research can continue.
MegaSonicGeo: Well, the way we talked about it in micro econ was patents drive innovation. Just because the production cost is low doesn’t mean that first successful pill wasn’t billions on billions of dollars. Not to mention all the failed attempts they have to make up for.
TheMacPhisto: 1 Month of advair in the US? $450
3 months of advair in Canada? $60
TasslehoffBurrfoot-: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/
TheRealJDubb: The article states that monopoly pricing is being caused by “government interference”, but does not actually tell us the form of that interference or the proposal to eliminate it, other than in generic terms.
If the “interference” is that our law grants exclusivity in the form of patent rights to creators of new products, then *of course* the government (by creating and enforcing patent laws) is granting monopolies.
Our intellectual property laws exist for good reason, and not to “line the pockets of big pharma”. They reflect a balance of the need to have competition (to drive down prices) and the need to reward research and discovery, without which companies would not invest millions to develop the new medicines that we benefit from.
If the proposed solution is to limit inventors’ intellectual property rights and increase competition (earlier generics) then we need to also study how this will prevent investment in advancement of medicine.
Just_A_Sports_Guru: “America is the most taxed nation!!” You hear that all the fucking time.
You never hear though “America is grossly expensive to live in!!”
Anyone who thinks our government, especially the GOP, gives a shit about the every day people is just fucking stupid or an asshole. The GOP is ALWAYS helping business and almost literally never helps the other 99% of people who are just middle class or don’t own a business.
They grant just silly power and flexibility to things like Big Pharma, gas and oil companies, real estate holders etc. And they just. keep. doing. it. Over and over and over. So much so that we are now close to Idiorcracy levels of corporate control, they just fucking own everything, and it’s 100 times worse when it has anything to to with healthcare.
SilverSilurus: I’m getting real tired of all these stupid “”””””news”””””” stories lately telling us shit about corruption that everyone already knows as if it’s some shocking revelation.
Davidskylark: I don’t get why Harvard studied this.. I know this just because it’s obvious
RaoulDuke209: Their harm is also equally proportionate to law and systematic misinformation.
Drugs aren’t bad. Prohibition is bad.
Mooseisabitfat: This is the kind of thing that would have brought me over to Trump’s side. It should be obvious to everyone that this is a problem and he should be raising hell about it.
NjStacker22: Is this news now?
Did someone mention Canada? Don’t bet on this part of the world … It’s a shady spot.
Barry Sherman, one of the few capitalist billionaires of the world, has been found dead in Toronto. The wealthy titan was writting his biography and saying he would expose corruption of his enemies in pharmaceutical multinational corporations. Police suspect he has been executed.
OYou812: Why do they always announce they are going to expose corruption ahead of time? They always die when they do that.
5pez____A: Apotex is as shady as they come.
tarmogoyf333: Strangled to death, the article makes it sound like “maybe” there’s foul play. Wtf?
KevinWCollarBone: Here in Canada they are saying he strangled her then hung himself. The family is tellng the police no way that happened. It will be interesting to see how far the police take this. Or will it just be shut down by TPTB.
TorontoCorrupt: Police? Ping me if you can find a less corrupt law enforcement entity in the developed world.
chaoticmessiah: I say it again, North America (especially the US) tends to put profit before patients, so I can absolutely imagine a rival pharmaceutical company paid someone to kill them both, so they can buy up his company’s assets and continue working for more money and less patient care.
The healthcare over there is disgusting, honestly.
GetsGold: Drug patents are on the manufacture process not on the drug themselves. His company developed new ways of making existing drugs. So not surprising he might have enemies.
MuskokaGunner: Barry Sherman developed a lot of enemies with the way he operated long before his biography.
vannucker: He also screwed his cousins out of the family fortune so he had more enemies than just that.
Whaddaya Say?