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by gruez 697 days ago
>Yep. Probably people who are on drugs that cost very little to make but are being sold for enormous amounts of money.

This entirely ignores the cost of R&D, clinical trials, and most importantly, all the other drugs that didn't make it to market.
3 comments
magicalhippo 697 days ago
Here in Norway we have this deal where oil companies can get refunded a significant fraction of their expenses searching for oil if they didn't make a profit[1].

On the flip side, once they start making a profit, they have to pay a similarly high fraction in taxes.

This is to incentivize searching while also letting the profits benefit the majority.

Had a shower thought if such a model might have worked on the pharmaceutical market as well.

[1]: https://www.nrk.no/klima/xl/leterefusjonen_-disse-selskapene...

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ceejayoz 697 days ago
The industry spends more on marketing - bombarding daytime TV with “ask your doctor about dksieiddjievan” for example - than R&D.
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gruez 697 days ago
Source? Apparently such claims are questionable:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/16472/do-typica...

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ceejayoz 697 days ago
That’s largely a quibble over where the line between “sales” and “marketing” is drawn.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

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gruez 697 days ago
How does that article add to the discussion in any way? It's just repeating the same infographic that's in the stackexchange post, and is seemingly making the same mistake of rounding off "Selling, marketing, and administrative" in financial reports to "sales and marketing".
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s1artibartfast 697 days ago
This is true, but marketing is revenue positive and R&D is revenue negative.
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bluefirebrand 697 days ago
Sure, but are they marked up to "return on investment" prices, or "make all of the executives so enormously wealthy that it's actually disgusting" prices?

My bet is the latter

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gruez 697 days ago
>Sure, but are they marked up to "return on investment" prices, or "make all of the executives so enormously wealthy that it's actually disgusting" prices?

The healthcare sector's 5 year profit margins is 10.0%. That puts it in the middle of the pack when it comes to the other sectors.

https://insight.factset.com/hs-fs/hubfs/1)Insight/2024/04.20...

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