Kamala is going to snatch patents?

Oh, are we going to impose economic sanctions on ourselves? How does that work?

 

LMAO at all the rubes who insist we have to be price gouged for drugs. Its sort of unbelievable the peasant mentality of Americans. Just repeating "but R&D" like big pharma has trained them. A lot of of capitalists giving up the game insisting there's no incentive to make anything without being able to profit from the kind of excessive markups possible from no competition.

 

Well, the money is apparently well spent unlike funding green scam companies that go on to failure and bankruptcy. Those folks laugh all the way to the bank while offering to give back patents.

 

Illegally snatching patents works.

Better have all of the legal work vetted as this crapola will go to the SCOTUS and be overturned. Add to the list:

Student loan forgiveness
$25,000 for first time home buyers
Snatching patents because yes, we can.

 

The right wing hated big pharma during covid and now they've come back home to loving them again

 

I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but a decade ago, big Pharma was consistently spending more on marketing than on R&D.

 

The intended point of the question was to probe the notion that a patent could never or should never be revoked. It had nothing to do with Kamala's comment, it had to do with 96's comment. It simply had to do with the nature of whether or not an event could exist that would justify a patent being revoked.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Would you say the status quo (re: pharmaceuticals and pricing) is best case scenario or do you believe there is room for improvement? I think that's really the starting point. If we think that what we have right now is the absolute best we can do, then there's not much reason to attempt to discuss the details unless we could identify what an improvement could look like. However, if we both recognize that there might be room for improvement, then it is fruitful to discuss what that might look like.

Go GATORS!
,WESGATORS

 

Free market when it comes to healthcare has significant problems. One, the commodity is a person's health. If someone doesn't get the healthcare they need, they suffer and could die. Do we really want a free market here that allows people to suffer and die based on their ability to pay?

When it comes to pharmaceuticals, the research failure rate is very high. 80% or higher. Costs to research a new drug can often be in the billions. Meaning, it's possible for a drug to make it all the way to trial, only to be rejected, and never making a dime.

In addition, a true free market would mean very little to no research for ailments that have a low rate of incidents. Low demand would mean billions spent on research, only to, in the end, have a very low demand because the illness isn't widespread. The chance for profit would be extremely low, and cost likely very high so that the company could potentially profit.

Government funding for research takes away most of the risk from research failure. It should also mean new treatments for new drugs that treat rarer conditions should be affordable for those who suffer. Otherwise, the profit motive, again, gets in the way of a person's quality of life, or could cause a person to lose his/her life.

Free market works great for transportation. A person could desire a new Cadillac, but if they have to settle for a used Chevy, they can still get from point A to point B. If a person requires medical treatment, the Cadillac cost might be the only option.

 

I don’t think we have the right balance currently but the fact is the costs of developing and testing new drugs is often enormous, so without the profit incentive you would need some other mechanism to fund these efforts. Would it be just as effective if it was all government funded with no private incentives? I tend to think not but I don’t know.

 

The question is "why don't the US pharma companies charge other countries the same price they charge here for drugs?" If they are charging less because the other country negotiated it, then we should pay that same price too. If the other country says "that's too much, we won't pay it!". Then guess what, you don't get that drug for your people. What I don't like is one set of rules for someone and another set for someone else.

 

Agreed. Just providing some context for the post I replied to. Not intending to somehow justify government confiscation.

 

That's the problem of a for-profit system. Treatment is profitable. Prevention isn't. Producing enough insulin to lower the cost isn't either. Drug companies and patent holders operate from that mindset. Its not like they are researching a cure for cancer with all this R&D, they are researching new markets to penetrate from a profitability standpoint. They aren't researching how to make existing drugs less expensive, for example. Given the money made by Ozempic, that's the kind of windfall they are chasing in most cases.

 

I think people also overlook the intersection in patent acquisition / finance capital /hedge funds. Would people get mad if Harris revoked the patent of another would be Martin Shrekeli, buying a patent to boost the price of a pill from $1 to $30 to pay off the debt financing of the acquisition? Who would defend his right to charge whatever he wants just by holding the patent?

 

I agree with this. That’s why I say the balance is off. A lot of the research is to tweak existing drugs that are coming off patent just enough to be able to roll out a new drug that is just slightly better and have it on patent.

Given the monopolistic like behavior of prescriptions I absolutely think the government should have more pricing power.

 

Or the company that holds a patent has spent large amounts of capital to discover a new drug or treatment where none exists. Take the “weight loss drugs”, those compounds were in the lab for years before they ever saw a patient let alone were in a trial.
Many of those drugs not only had short term (1 year) study but long term 2-3-4 year studies to show how effective they are not only at weight loss but at lowering other risks associated with other comorbidities.

Running trials aren’t cheap, and how many failures happen before a success.