[lnlyplnt]

I often disagree with Jeff Sachs, but I find his argument here highly persuasive.

- There is no reason the US should be giving away IP for free

- The US Government should use its purchasing power as a check against the drug companies

- Drug companies should be able to reap profits, but profits at a 10-20x P/E not 100x

[msandford]

> There is no reason the US should be giving away IP for free

This times a million. If you fix that, most of the drug problem goes away here in the US even if you don't start letting Medicaid bargain.

[sseveran]

Pfizer's PE with morning was 22.28. Gilead's was 10.21.

[acveilleux]

Would love a source on the Gilead numbers.

[hga]

How about here: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GILD

Says it's 10.20 as I enter this.

[acveilleux]

I'd thought previous poster was providing the P/E for the specific HCV drug used in the HuffPo piece. Which is what was being implied should be kept lower then 100x in this thread.

[hga]

Perhaps, but I would take that metric to be ridiculous, because the company cares about it across it's entire portfolio, in this case 21 products it's currently selling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilead_Sciences), looks like they do some very early stage/general research, products like Tamiflu they evidently had to license to get to market (reduced profit for them), products which have expired or soon to expire patents, and all their failures, past and future.

At least one of which is implied in the Wikipedia article, also see their current pipeline, some of those are going to fail, and at the end their 22 failures to date. 1 in Phase III trials ($$$, efficacy, the most expensive), 5 in Phase II (fairly expensive, I think), 5 in Phase I (certainly not "cheap").

It sure looks like they're doing the right thing with their science and medicine, their founder was motivated by having contracted deng fever, which is untreatable (besides of course supportive measure). Clearly the right thing to do is to beat them up the few times they hit it out of the ballpark with a "100x" success, that'll teach them and the other drug companies!