Yes! And if you think that’s evil, wait til you find out about dynamic pricing;
Charge people differently; setting the price to the maximum that each can handle…
That is at the core of modern capitalism; maximizing profits. yes it is too bad so sad that some people die; they should have worked harder to have gotten better jobs
Charging wealthier people higher prices and subsiding the less wealthy sounds great! I figure that with the profit motive, it’s all gone to shit though.
I’m on a generic of truvada as a preventative. 30 days can be $1500-2000 for name brand no insurance. I get mine for $5 and somehow my insurance, the pharmacy, and the manufacturer are all still making enough money off that $5 to not complain. How the fuck are they getting away with the $2k pricetag
I take Xolair, which is billed at about $5k for four syringes. Insurance pays $4875 and the Xolair copay program, run by the manufacturer, pays $125. Why are they so willing to pick up the copay? Before four syringes of Xolair cost about $60 in total to produce.
Because the insurance company already paid them way more than it’s really worth. And if the insurance company has agreed to pay that much, it’s because they’re making more than enough profit off their “service” to everyone that they can afford to pay it.
If your medicine used to cost $60 and now costs $5000 thst’s because the insurance company knows they can get that money from its customers.
If they sell you pay $5 for the drug and the next person in line pays $2k for the same drug, they are making $1k per patient. They are also writing off the $3k that they could be charging you as a charitable contribution, so they don’t have to pay taxes on the income. They hope that if they keep you alive, some day you will make enough money to pay full retail price.
Medical science: with this we could cure everyone in earth of the disease for only $20!
Pharmaceutical industry: Okay that goes in the vault forever. Now make us one that just treats the symptoms and we’ll charge $5,000 a month for it.
This would be terrible business if any pharma worked this way. The vast majority of potential treatments fail either in the lab or in early phase trials. It is not very likely that’d you’d be able to on-demand develop a novel treatment for symptoms before one of your competitors figured out your already-discovered cure. That would be unless you patented the cure, but by the time you spent years developing a new symptom-only treatment and testing it through each phase, you’d have a few years at best before your exclusivity on the cure patent expires and thus your treatment becomes worthless.
Pharmas are run by the same short-sighted wall streeters as every other corporation. Actually successfully executing this sort of long-term plan would require thinking further ahead than a few quarters, which they are not capable of doing. A new cure is a big stock boost now that they could never resist.
It was a hypothetical. In reality they’re not finding many actual cures in the first place because they’re seeking rents not cures.
Rent seeking is not applicable for any company developing new medicines because that by definition is creating new wealth. I wouldn’t disagree with that characterization for any company milking an out-of-patent treatment by trying to make it unfeasible for any other company to manufacture it. You are correct that does exist.
Cures are difficult to develop due to how variable human physiology is, but we still manage to do so. Vaccines are also a way more effective instrument for disease eradication; it’s better to prevent anyone getting the disease in the first place.
Theres an economic theory used to set prices called Supply:Demand Equilibrium wherein you maximize profit by calculating a curve and generating a table where the axis are number of buyers and price bought at.
If the good is a necessity then you can expect a large number of people will buy it regardless of how high the price is, if they have the money, giving the incentive to set the prices higher despite having less demand at that price range.
It’s better, from a capitalist’s pov, to sell something to a single person for a grand than it is to sell to a hundred for a dollar. Especially if that keeps misery high.
Imagine prior to Obama Care where an insurance company could deny you for having a preexisting condition.