If anyone reads this for medical advice (and I really hope they wouldn't be taking advice directly from HN without any filtering), you don't combine them in equal proportions.
Yes, you combine 500mg of acetaminophen and 150mg of ibuprofen. Ibuprofen only comes in 200mg pills, so if you want to be really spot on, take the liquid stuff for kids.
500mg is the max for ace a doctor is recommended to proscribe (on it's own). 150 is well below the max for ibu. Also I think you may have mixed up the grandparent commentator that stated they were a doctor and the parent that may be a doctor but hasn't made that claim here.
200mg is normal for ibuprofen, and prescriptions for 800mg versions are not unusual.
Meanwhile 500mg is, I believe, more than they combine with opiates and acetaminophen does lead to death via organ failure on the order of hundreds of people a year. I was curious why they weighted the acetaminophen proportionally so much higher than the ibuprofen.
It still seems odd. Both Tylenol and ibuprofen are good to keep around with your basic home health care supplies. They are available in cheap generics without a prescription. They have different things they are best at, so stocking both is quite reasonable.
Unless they need to be prescribed in ratios that can't be achieved reasonably with the cheap OTC pill dose sizes, it's not clear to my why I'd want a combined bill instead of just taking separate pills.
Taking more than one pill is less convenient, but except for people who have trouble with pills in general I doubt they would want to pay more for that convenience.
Even in the case of fairly high doses, it is not too bad. A few months ago, for example, I somehow managed to get a painful rotator cuff injury while sleeping (no idea how), and my doctor told me to take 1000 mg Tylenol every 8 hours and 800 mg of ibuprofen every 8 hours. At the most common OTC strengths, that would be two Tylenol pills and 4 ibuprofen pills.
If we had decent competition in medicine this wouldn't be an issue. Either people would agree with you and not buy it, or some would buy it, and no one would be worse off.
I realize in retrospect my comment might have appeared that way. I meant only that people might (possibly) read your comment and be misinformed. I meant it might be mistakenly read as legal advice, not that it was.
It's a damn shame that doctors often fail to tell people about cheaper and more irritating alternatives, but there's nothing wrong with giving people the option to pay more for a better experience.
You often see this in terms of number of times a drug had to be taken per day. There'll be a generic that needs to be taken say three times a day, and a newer drug that only needs to be taken once.
I highly doubt every manufacturer of Ibuprofen or Acetaminophen would decide to throw in the towel if this new drug was released.