http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/01/goddamn-the-pusher-man/singlepage
schizophrenia drugs costing $4,500 per year save more than $70,000 in annual institutional treatment costs
Also, there are cheaper generic drugs that are available. Many people take generic drugs to save money. In several years, the patent for Abilify will expire, and its generic version will be available too.
I see that DU has a thread about this. Not a single person there has shown any understanding or appreciation for how difficult and expensive it is to invent a new drug. And none of them seem to understand that these “expensive” drugs for treating schizophrenia are far cheaper than the cost of institutionalization. And none of them seem to understand that life on these drugs is far better than spending your life in a hospital.
But he is correct in his principles. He sticks to what he knows is the truth, and doesn't try to be a slick politician and be everything to everyone. We need more of this.
He is spot on with his analysis. And the FDA is one orrrupt organization. Ask anyone who followed the story of Dendreon.
It can take up to 1 billion to bring a drug to market..and with a limited patent life, only a few years to recoup the investment and turn a profit. 17 year patent, up to 13 years chewed up in development.
First, some of the huge costs have to do with offsetting giving or steeply discounting the drug to some (many) patients. Others to offset the scores of drugs that cost money to develop, but never made it to market.
Case in point. A new cystic fibrosis drug has been approved. It will GREATLY help 10% of CF sufferers. With tweaking, it may help some of the rest.
The drug costs $300,000 per year. There are 30,000 CF sufferers in the U.S., so that’s a pool of only 3,000 patients (compare with the pool for cholesterol, diabetes or blood pressure meds).
In 17 years or whatever, generics will be available. Somewhat sooner, similar products will also drive the cost down. In the meantime, some people who have a horrible genetic disorder, great suffering and a short life assigned to them, may be able to live a normal, full length life. This is a huge deal. Without the payoff, the drug WOULD NOT EXIST.
My brother, a lib lawyer, once told me that something had to be done about “big pharma” because they were the most profitable industry in the country. I argued that was good since it would spur the development of new and better medicines which most of us want. I then asked him that since liberals seem to have industries ranked on how deserving they are to make money, which ones are their top 3, and why do they deserve to make that money, and which place should pharma occupy? He didn’t have an answer for that, it just felt bad that pharma was on top.
I dislike Santorum, but he is correct. These drugs would not EXIST if there were no possibility of them earning enough to pay for their own development and production, and paving the way for further research on other medicines. Stupid hit piece. Infantile premises.
Purchasing Abilify is expensive but if it works well it is worth it plus the manufacturer has a program if you can not afford it they will give it to you for free. I am told this is common for expensive pharmaceuticals.
The market would fix the out of control healthcare costs. The problem is that very few patients pay their own bills. It doesn’t make much difference if it’s insurance or the government paying the bills, the market doesn’t really exist.
These are the types of situations that we need a candidate like Newt to win; he knows how to deflect these types of bogus arguments and still win the issue on facts. Neither Santorum nor Romney are capable of doing that ...and it becomes more and more obvious each day.
Good for him. This type of exchange is exactly what Republicans need to engage in. Its also part of Chris Christie’s appeal. The Dems are good at putting someone sympathetic in front of a GOP politician and having them say “How can you be so heartless as to say the government shouldn’t pay for my treatment or pay me a fair wage?” Way too many times, the GOP candidate stammers and stutters because they don’t have the intelligence or stones to make a coherent argument that the market has a better solution to the person’s problem than the government. Its hard to tell a mother that she should pay a fortune for a drug for her sick kid because the implication is that they may not be able to afford it and the kid will die. The argument is that if we didn’t allow the market to work and charge these prices, there would be no new drugs, but that is cold comfort for the mother. I’m glad Santorum did this. It increased my respect for him.
Under this argument, taken to its logical extreme, if 24 hour nursing care was a life saving therapy for the woman's schizophrenic son, then nurses should not be entitled to accept the highest paying jobs they could find but should be limited instead to earning what this mother could afford to pay, even if that amount was insufficient to repay the costs of nursing school and would force nurses into bankruptcy. Can't everyone see these nurses have an "obligation" to this woman and those like her; the nerve of nurses putting their individual pursuit of life, liberty and happiness ahead of their obligation to this woman and anyone else like her! How greedy!
Most people don’t realize that the government infuses huge amounts of money in the way of grants for these manufacturers in the name of research.
When a new drug is found and patented, the government receives nothing from the patent. Worse yet, the government becomes the largest customer for the new drug since the welfare system will pay for most of it. In addition to that the price of any drug (new or old) is unreasonably high to government approved and out of control litigation costs, FDA regulations and a myriad of other hurdles anyone in the health field has to jump over.
How’s that for throwing our money away in the name of crony capitalism?
Setup.
Of all the most important drugs that were ever developed to treat disease in the last century, I can’t think of a single one that came out of the USSR, China, Cuba, or any other socialist/communist heaven.
Socialists should quit vilifying drug companies and try to calculate how many millions of their own children died because those regimes turned their backs on the most effective model for drug development ever invented: capitalism. If anyone is venal, it’s the socialists.
Having sold Abilify for seven years, I got a chuckle out of this. First, as has been pointed out, it costs about $400/month at the lower doses that kids would likely take. Secondly, the value of a child succeeding academically and socially during his/her primary education years cannot be underestimated. If the drug was truly helping, there may be huge present and future value. Schizophrenia is extremely rare in children, and the child was most likely being treated for behavioral issues, such as this newly created ODS(Oppositional Defiance Syndrome) diagnosis.
Another thing I have noticed in visiting clinics where these children are treated is that their biggest problem is often their parents, who are destroying the kids by persistent poor behaviors, such as shouting at the kids and acting just as selfish and immature as the kids. Also, many of the parents have mental health issues of their own, and just cannot cope with the job of parenting.
I still don’ get why conservatives are not rallying around Santorum.
He sticks to his guns and tells it like he sees it. I reallly wish he were the front runner.
What Santorum is not telling us is that if the market actually did set drug prices, we would be paying a lot less than the artificial prices imposed on us within the US. Pharma companies have had the legal system manipulated to prevent Americans from shopping around on the world market. They will go on donating whatever it takes to Santorum and Romney to keep the scam going.
There was a time not too long ago that people sought help from their parish or church when things like this cost too much, or they didn’t have insurance. Then government stepped in and said they could do it better and actually put a lot of churches out of the charitable business. It’s a travesty, really, and in the meantime, church attendance has plummeted. So, you have whole generations growing up outside the church body and learning to depend on the government. What could possibly go wrong?