NOVARTIS To Charge $475,000 For $20,000 Cancer Cure Funded By Taxpayers And Charity

originally posted by: namehere
a reply to: infolurker

yeah, it exists and i never said it didn't, what i said was the main reason it happens is one of two reasons, the first is when a resource becomes rare and the laws are not enforced and the second reason is when excessive regulations drive up prices thus simulating rarity of a commodity...

i never said there should be no regulations, what i said is that current regulations go too far and endangers our country by driving prices up in every sector of the economy, for rare disease drug development costs are so high and progress is delayed so often because regulations go too far, leaving many hanging for decades.

The main problem has always been the generic drug laws.

a reply to: infolurker

indeed that's what i meant by excessive regulations being counterproductive and actually promoting abuse by corporations, they can go both ways and corporations are overreacting with price hikes to protect themselves from losing everything.

capitalism recognizes that humans think of their own selfish interest first and foremost but that when self interests between people meet together the logical relationships is naturally mutually beneficial and equal when restrained lightly, that they will always do what is right when selfish interests cross, when regulations go too far it breaks the trust fostered through those natural relationships, without trust people will naturally try to exploit others and it creates a vicious cycle of abuse,

a reply to: M4ngo

yeah that's what happens when there's no trust and corporations fear losing money and being bankrupted if they don't monopolize, that's not capitalism at that point anymore.

america needs to learn to calm down and back off a bit, to trust the system and not panic when things go wrong every time.

too tired to continue so goodnight...

originally posted by: namehere
a reply to: M4ngo

yeah that's what happens when there's no trust and corporations fear losing money and being bankrupted if they don't monopolize, that's not capitalism at that point anymore.

america needs to learn to calm down and back off a bit, to trust the system and not panic when things go wrong every time.

too tired to continue so goodnight...

Trust what system?
I don't think you understand.The FDA can be blamed. The generic drug laws directly suppress medical innovation and the lowering of drug prices. A major factor for the increasingly higher drug prices is generic drug laws.

a reply to: namehere

price gouging is rare and it only happens when costs are driven up by excessive regulations, if price gouging happens then take legal action instead of regulating the whole industry and punishing innocent businesses and people.

First we would have to define price gouging.

Standard treatment costs about 30k per month or more. This is a biological treatment that cannot be mass produced. It is made from the patients own genes and takes months to produce with a gene editor. I'm not saying that justifies the cost necessarily but we aren't talking about aspirin.

If Novartis owns the procedure to make the therapy they must use their own doctors, techs, etc to create each dose so labor costs plus equipment costs are factored in.

Medical equipment/supplies is practically an unregulated industry and is sometimes the most expensive part of a medical bill. It's also where the outrageous cost starts. Pharma needs those supplies to make their outrageously expensive drugs.

There are things that we the people should collectively own. Our health shouldn't be held for ransom.

a reply to: infolurker

This has an easy fix. India can and will make the cure and sell it at bargain basement prices and screw the big pharma out of billions. And there is nothing Novartis can do about it because India does not recognise US patents or copyrights for medications and drugs.

originally posted by: Kali74
Standard treatment costs about 30k per month or more. This is a biological treatment that cannot be mass produced. It is made from the patients own genes and takes months to produce with a gene editor. I'm not saying that justifies the cost necessarily but we aren't talking about aspirin.

If Novartis owns the procedure to make the therapy they must use their own doctors, techs, etc to create each dose so labor costs plus equipment costs are factored in.

Medical equipment/supplies is practically an unregulated industry and is sometimes the most expensive part of a medical bill. It's also where the outrageous cost starts. Pharma needs those supplies to make their outrageously expensive drugs.

There are things that we the people should collectively own. Our health shouldn't be held for ransom.

My wife is a Scientist for this company.

She works her a$$ off trying to develop cures.

It is all extremely expensive and many people are involved.

I thought this was a huge breakthrough...

They are completely revamping their approach.

Focusing on the body's healing power.

When she was telling me about this I was wondering if it could help you.

If and this is a big IF, America chose to go down the route of NHS, please please dont let it become a political tool, the funding should be ringfenced and each year increase by 1-2%, all that happen in the UK is each party states that they can sort the NHS mess out, dont believe the h̶y̶p̶e̶ tripe that each party spews.

As a UK resident I do believe the NHS is better than having to own insurance BUT that is not to say the NHS is perfect, and anything any government has its hands on directly will be squeezed to make funds available elsewhere.

I will say it again, ringfence the money if A country wants to provide health care for all

originally posted by: Ironclad3000
a reply to: infolurker

This has an easy fix. India can and will make the cure and sell it at bargain basement prices and screw the big pharma out of billions. And there is nothing Novartis can do about it because India does not recognise US patents or copyrights for medications and drugs.

One can only hope.

and yet... we are telling the taxpayers they have no "right" to affordable healthcare...

this kind of money shouldn't be going into the research and development of this or any other drug, unless the taxpayers footing the bill are guaranteed to have access to the care that their tax dollars developed...
and by that I mean that the care is affordable to the taxpayers.
heck we can't even manage to have the health insurance affordable to the danged taxpayers!!!
but hey, it's the best healthcare system in the world, at least for those few who can afford to take full advantage of it isn't it!

a reply to: infolurker

Your OP has proven my suspicions right. For many years now I have not given any money at all to cancer research because:

1) None of the money is spent researching nutrition as either a cause or a treatment for cancer.

2) The crowd might be funding the research but the crowd will never get the patents for any new treatments making them cheaply available for the crowd, (the masses.) The patents will be owned by some big giant pharma mob who charge us an arm and a leg to use them.

IMO, any damn fool could see this coming

this happens when you allow pharma companies to set their own price, without proper checks and balances put in place.

A couple of years ago i worked for a pharma multinational as a market access manager. I was responsible for writing the pricing and reimbursements files for new drugs. Patients were rarely put central in these applications.
The main question my superiors had was: what is the maximum amount of money we can ask for that would generate enough money for our shareholders, but still would be acceptable by the different health agencies throughout the world.
The starting point of these files were always the same: what is the actual cost of the worst case scenario, when a patient doesn"t receive any treatment at all. For cancer treatments, that is usually death. That cost will vary, based upon the type of cancer. That cost would be set as baseline. Second, what is the actual cost of standard of care, in other words what is the cost of the currently most widely accepted standard treatment. Depending upon the clinical evidence that we generated during the trails we had to calculate our way up to that either the cost of non-treatment, or the standard of care treatment. Sometimes we had to be very creative.
The actual cost of the new drug, from R&D to production, distribution and marketing costs, was rarely the price we were going for.

I became really good at it. And i'm not proud of it, but it took me a while to realize that everything i was doing, was not for the benefit of the patients that suffer from these disease (even though that was the companies' tagline towards the world), but for the benefit of the happy few that held the shares of the company. Year after year, I saw these internal announcements passing by boasting how the company was able to increase, on a yearly basis, the dividends it was able to issue to its shareholders. I became disgusted from this company, and the person the company had turned me into. I quit not long after that epiphany.

Healthcare should not be for-profit. Healthcare should be considered as a basic universal human right, and should be taken out of the for-profit hands.

The really, REALLY sad thing about the whole drug-price issue is: there's already a solution. But HHS refuses to use it. It's something called "march-in rights."

Here's how it works. When the federal government — through an agency like the National Institutes of Health — pays for medical research that leads to an invention that can be patented, federal law gives the government a license to use that intellectual property.

What is happening is that the government pays for the research and the doctors and companies market the medications. The government retains a license to the intellectual property as a check, to ensure that the medicines are available to the public on "reasonable terms."

There have been several pushes for the government to assert this right, such as this case:

Last year Doggett, along with 50 other members of Congress, backed a request by the group Knowledge Ecology International for NIH to use its march-in authority to lower the price of Xtandi , a prostate cancer drug.

At the time the medication was sold by a Japanese company for about $88 a pill, according to KEI, a nonprofit organization that advocates for social justice. Last April, KEI said, a Canadian drug company offered to sell a generic version of Xtandi to the government for just $3 per pill.

NIH declined to use its license or take that offer.

The solution is already there. The government simply refuses to use it.

NPR
Better article here
and another from The Hill