Less than $4.3k to go!!
Posted on 03/01/2014 4:31:40 PM PST by grundle
Ninety five percent of the new drugs coming on the market are developed for sale in the United States. They are paid for by American consumers, while other countries, such as Canada, Germany and France, free ride at our expense. The United States is the last major country that allows the market to set prices high enough to compensate pharmaceutical companies for their R&D investments. Obama Care will increasingly control pharmaceutical prices as costs rise and federal and state funds fall short. Major pharmaceutical advances will stop, and the rest of the world will lose along with Americans.
The “dinosaur” that we rarely hear about are the drugs that have improved, prolonged, and changed our lives. When President Eisenhower suffered a massive heart attack in September of 1955, his doctors could only inject a pain killer and prescribe bed rest. When Vice President Cheney suffered heart attacks almost a half century later, he was given powerful blood thinners, a stent was inserted, and he was released from the hospital shortly thereafter. Before acid inhibitors, ulcer sufferers had only operations that cut off ulcerated portions of their stomachs. Before AZT drugs, an HIV positive test was a death sentence. tPA saved millions of heart attack and stroke victims. HPV is an effective vaccination against cervical cancer. Anti-psychotic medications allow patients with schizophrenia to live productive lives. Viagra saved millions of men the shame of sexual dysfunction, and probably rescued thousands of marriages. The list goes on and on.
Without the hard-pressed American consumer to finance R&D costs, we would not have AZT, Cimetidine, Nexium, tPA, Beta blockers, new cancer drugs, anti psychotic drugs, and all the rest. American consumers pony up, while the rest of the world benefits without paying its share.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Pretty crappy reason to dislike Obamacare. We’ve been, according to this article, subsidizing the world’s drug supply with our tax dollars and insurance premiums. Now they’re whining that our subsidy will be gone and that’s going to affect us as well as them. Tough. Let the socialized medicine countries help foot the bill for the drugs.
this “Fundamental Transformation” of america has GOT to stop NOW!
It’s partly true.
There will still be innovation where the government hasn’t figured out how to pressure the market with generics (biologic drugs), or there are politically powerful patient advocacy groups (e.g. oncology, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s).
Yes, the US health system will become more like Europe’s regardless of whether Obamacare is repealed.
The question is whether we become like the Netherlands (pretty good), or like the UK or Poland (can you say “snuff party”?)
The European governments won’t do it. They would prefer that their populations die off. It will enable the feudal vision they have for Europe.
What the effect will be is more consolidation in the pharma industry, and fewer biotech startups. In the end it will mean less innovation, but this will happen over the span of decades, not years.
Stories like this make me quite angry. I have an illness that will worsen as time moves on. I’ve read about some promising things on the horizon, but Obamacare is going to put one hell of a chasm between here and the horizon.
Because a rabbit enjoys a few of your turnips doesn’t mean you burn the garden.
We will mame do with less and so will the world. I’d rather have new drugs even if it meant the socialsts plunder it as well.
“Before acid inhibitors, ulcer sufferers had only operations that cut off ulcerated portions of their stomachs”
I owe my life to Zantac. I could drink 4 bottles of Maalox/Mylanta and it wouldn’t touch it.
The wheels are coming off the generic solution. With manufacturing resources scarce, the owners of the businesses just pull production of meds that patients have taken for years but are relatively unprofitable. When the demand is sufficient for the desired price rise to occur, they reappear. It’s a good business model, heh?
The average drug in the USA takes 11 years of clinical trials and 1.2 BILLION dollars —just one drug.
If it turns out it might help other diseases also, it must be re-tested for that other disease.
Because the documentation process is so very rigorous many other countries simply accept the judgements of the FDA.
Obamcare might sink ALL these other countries.
No:
The patent process makes drugs very profitable because for 10 or so years other potential makers are excluded, and those resulting profits means companies can fund very risky, pie-in-the-sky research. For THAT reason US research tempo is high and the number of new drugs for the whole WORLD is high.
If drug discovery is less profitable in the USA, less research will be done in the USA. And THAT means considerably fewer drugs for the whole world.
And so my point is that the "drug field" will not be plundered directly by socialists so much as by the new market forces that come to bear.
Bump
It’s also worth mentioning in this context the Obamacare tax on medical devices. This will also reduce innovation in that area.
Obamacare medical device tax led to loss of 33,000 jobs, report says
33,000 laid off or not hired
Excerpt:
A new survey says Obamacare’s tax on medical device manufacturers forced companies to lay off or avoid hiring 33,000 workers last year — adding another arrow to the GOP’s quiver as Republicans aim to portray the health care law as a job-killing program.
The report from the Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed, underscored the latest line of attack against President Obama’s signature law, as Republicans also trumpet the potential harm of the law’s insurance rules on employers and a new report suggests government-subsidized health plans will prompt more than 2 million people to work less or leave the workforce.
And people voted for the country to devolve back to 1800s and to give up our exceptionalism. All the hopey dopies who want everything to be green and backward.
“the president’s specific words: I’m “really good at killing people,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write”
Many of the same drugs are made by the same companies in other countries. The drug companies thank you for helping the more equal consituents by supporting poor, “developing” countries when paying the highest prices by far. A special thanks to those of you not employed by government offices or global corporations: those of you who’ve been buying the drugs with your own money for all of these years.
Medicine and drug companies have been bathing with pathological special interests in socialism for a long time, BTW. A true free market would be a much better start. Give the doctor $25 and a bottle of whiskey. Bite down on the stick, while he fixes you up.
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