Posted on 07/12/2016 11:54:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
“free markets work...”
That’s why your pink tomatoes are so delicious.
I appreciate your attempt to answer. The basic issue(I know there are others) is the vast disparity in negotiation positions. That is the basic flaw in all Free Market arguments irrespective of product. Contract law assumes equal or relatively similar bargaining positions by the parties. That equality of position position has not existed once we left off being an agricultural society. Giant corporations came into being in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Huge Capitalists are as much bastards as are government bureaucrats. It is POWER not economics or good government. It was known 500 BC “Most men are bad.”-Heraclitus; “There is only one who is good”-Jesus of Nazareth
Instead of drug controls, go to a more free market system.
No mandated insurance coverage for drugs at all.
“The total cost and time of bringing a single new drug to market is now $2.6 billion”
Costs are actually not fixed.
Costs rise to eat up the funds available.
My neighbors “need” to spend five times more to live per person than me. Why? One has a nice government pension.
Gates is one who adds birth control to vaccines in Africa to kill babies and sterilize mothers.
Another way of dealing with the problem is by say having insurers spend say 8% to 15% of premiums on yearly “all our customers need” supplies of drugs.
No price controls whatsoever.
Dear Drug Company x CEO:
We are allocating 10% of our premiums this year to buy drugs.
At least one of yours looks to be of interest to us.
What percentage of our premiums do you want for them all?
Insurer CEO
Dear Drug Company B CEO:
Your company didn’t make the cut this year.
Sorry, better luck and pricing next year.
Insurer CEO
Dear Prospective Policy Buyer:
We have all you need supplies of these exclusive drugs this year:
Company A’s:
Company C’s:
Company N’s:
Company B and Company J didn’t make the cut this year with us.
Insurer CEO
Dear Customer John Public:
Sorry, we simply don’t cover drug DB1 made by Company B this year. They just didn’t offer us a competative value this year.
Please try to make a College Expected Financial Contribution offer to Company B for your needed annual supply.
Insurer CEO
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Obama has hurt EVERYTHING except BLM and radical Islam.
.
The only growth industries in the US are Food Stamps, Welfare, Social Security Disability , social agitation and importing Islamic terror.
There is a limit to how much the approval process can be streamlined. The drugs simply have to be tested on large enough sample sizes to get statistically meaningful results, and to reveal the serious deal-breaking but rare side-effects, preferably before the drug hits the market.
When a drug has to be tested in a few thousand members each of several different populations, that runs the cost up and increases the time necessary to test and then analyze the data. That is because the FDA won't approve a drug for use in a specific population--for example, children between ages 6 and 18--unless it has been tested extensively in that group.
The only case I know of where the testing process is streamlined is the flu vaccine. It still has to be tested in every group it will be marketed for, but the testing can be streamlined because the basic vaccine has already been extensively safety tested; only the specific viruses it protects against have been changed. A brand new kind of flu vaccine still has to undergo the ten+ years of testing.
I suppose some of the paperwork could be streamlined... maybe better databases to make the statistical analysis more standardized and efficient... but as far as the testing process goes, I just don't see a way to streamline.
That is a great idea. We pay too much for new drugs, precisely because we are not just paying our share of the cost of R&D, but also the R&D share of the cost of the drug in every foreign country. If the R&D costs were spread out among the entire quantity of drug sold, our prices would go down. While the foreign prices would increase, they would not increase to the price we currently pay to subsidize them.
The PhD level scientists who do the actual drug development are often paid more than that, and the overhead costs of hiring are nearly as much as the salary.
That said, the bulk of the cost is in the testing. Each patient costs tens of thousands of dollars (for care, medical evaluation and testing, etc.), and it is not unusual to have to test over 10,000 patients in the course of clinical trials. In addition, the cost of every drug candidate that did not make it through clinical trials is wrapped up in the drug development costs. The majority of drug candidates fail; the later in the process they fail, the more they cost.
Excuse me, but where on earth do people come up with such crazy stories?
Considering that the need for birth control is almost continuous throughout a woman's reproductive years, there are far better ways to distribute it to African women than by putting it in vaccines that they need only a few times in their whole lifetime!
Something to it. It is on the internets.
https://www.google.com/#q=bill+Gates+who+adds+birth+control+to+vaccines+in+Africa+to+kill+babies
As I thought: that link leads to a mixed bag of search results. Some of them are totally wacky, aimed at an audience who have absolutely no understanding of medical/scientific matters, others are conspiratorial and completely twist Bill Gates’ words into something he did not say at all, with maybe one or two debunking websites thrown in.
The HCG which the nutjob sites claim renders women infertile is actually used as a treatment for infertility. It makes no sense to place an infertility treatment into a vaccine, and even less sense if the intent is to combine a vaccine and a birth control. Plus (as I already said), there are more effective ways to provide birth control to women than in a vaccine they may only receive 2 or 3 times during their fertile years. Birth control is pretty much a *continuous* need.
And for the other aspect, that Bill Gates is somehow behind some conspiracy to kill off people, that is a complete (and deliberate) misrepresentation of his statement.
What he was referring to is the well-documented fact that when the majority of children live to adulthood, parents decide to have fewer children. This has happened in the US, Europe, and developed parts of Asia. However, when most children die before the age of five, people have several children in order to increase the chance of having at least one survive to adulthood. Bill Gates wants to provide vaccines so that more children will live. He expects the birth rate to naturally drop as a result, when people start devoting their energy to raising two or three children properly, rather than having baby after baby hoping for one to survive.
Many organizations are working to improve health care in Africa, and more African children are surviving as a result. And, because of that increased survival, the number of babies that an African woman gives birth to has dropped significantly: during my lifetime, it has dropped from ~8 per woman to ~4 per woman. And with better healthcare, it will drop even more, because babies are surviving.
I saw Abe on the Johnny Carson show the other day commenting about meeting fellow logger Paul Bunyan.
A drug that costs $100,000 a year is very, very affordable for a billionaire like Gates.
If he had to pay a percentage (say 5%) of his net worth above $200,000 and the same percentage of his annual income then he might sing a different tune.
I’m an advocate of percentage pricing, which would make drugs affordable to all without PPACA style “taxation”.
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