• Welcome to the new Internet Infidels Discussion Board, formerly Talk Freethought.

Government Take Over Of Pharmaceutical Production

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

Contributor
Joined
Nov 10, 2005
Messages
9,018
Location
Houston, Texas
Basic Beliefs
Strong Atheist
Pharmaceuticals have risen in price so high that many people cannot afford the drugs they need to survive. In the US high prices and price gouging seem to be out of control. In response, there are now proposals for the US government to take over producing drugs to cut out the pharmaceutical robber barons.

https://truthout.org/articles/remov...ur-pills-the-case-for-a-public-pharma-system/

Removing the Profit From Our Pills: The Case for a Public Pharma System
...
Any American who has paid the price of a patent-protected medicine knows the core flaw in the U.S. prescription drug system: our elected leaders have handed over control to profit-hungry corporations. And for-profit corporations gonna for-profit, as the kids would say. That is especially true when the corporations are gifted with long-term monopolies on life-essential medicines, which gives them the leverage to set take-it-or-leave it prices that net billions in revenue extracted from all of us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. That is the message of an exciting new report, Medicine for All: The Case for a Public Option in the Pharmaceutical Industry, by Dana Brown, director of the Next System Project of the organization Democracy Collaborative. “We can displace corporate power over our health and lives by moving toward a democratic, publicly-owned pharmaceutical sector, designed to respond to public health needs and deliver better health outcomes at lower costs,” Brown writes.
...

This to me seems to be a good idea. It is time to accept that sometimes, the free market is the problem, not the solution.
 
Isn't this the Price Elasticity issue that I studied back in my Micro-economics classes? When a product is highly valued and when the free market can't provide alternatives, then the price is free to rise (or rather, to be raised) ever higher.

My free-market friends assure me the high source of profits in these scenarios creates the incentives for others to introduce their own, cheaper alternatives, and so the price will fall to "market levels."

But when the product is A) absolutely necessary for one's survival and B) when the market is restricted from competition due to patent protections, then we have these types of scenarios. Consumers are expected to pay hundreds of dollars for a product that costs pennies to produce, and without it the consumers will die.


"Nationalize Insulin"

You go to the pharmacy and show ’em the insulin card from the government and they give you your insulin, for free, and you don’t die. This is absolutely possible, cheap, and uncomplicated.

It’s paid for the way the rest of civilization gets paid for, by taxes. Or we could forego, say, one F-35 per year to pay for it, which would turn out to be one of the few actual cases of the 21st-century American military system actually defending the lives and freedoms of American citizens.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
Agreed, and this is why Medicare for All doesn't go far enough if it leaves profiteering intact in the pharma and hospital/doctor sectors of the economy.
 
There are no good things to say about chasing profit in healthcare. Profit has no added benefit to healthcare. Health care descions are best left up to doctors, not to corporate executives who's only responsibility is to màke as much profit as possible.
 
SimpleDon said:
There are no good things to say about chasing profit in healthcare. Profit has no added benefit to healthcare. Health care descions are best left up to doctors, not to corporate executives who's only responsibility is to màke as much profit as possible.
Click to expand...

True, but doctors who are driven by profit exist and can refuse to accept Medicare as payment. A fully socialized medical care industry is the only way to restore the social contract as it concerns people's ability to continue living.
 
Why would government manufacture be a solution, unless government exempted itself from the patents it enforces?

Government made the monopoly and government can end the monopoly. The problem is the monopoly. Without monopoly, you get paracetamol at retail for 1c/ tablet.
 
Metaphor said:
Why would government manufacture be a solution, unless government exempted itself from the patents it enforces?

Government made the monopoly and government can end the monopoly. The problem is the monopoly. Without monopoly, you get paracetamol at retail for 1c/ tablet.
Click to expand...

Because if Big Pharma can't make obscene profits, they may stop making drugs, or play games with the system. Might as well forestall all of that. Much of the cost and work of discovering new drugs is actually paid for by the tax payer anyway. and no more shell games with Big Pharma, pharmacies, doctor's offices making it hard to find good discounts on anything. A rotten system at best.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
Metaphor said:
Why would government manufacture be a solution, unless government exempted itself from the patents it enforces?

Government made the monopoly and government can end the monopoly. The problem is the monopoly. Without monopoly, you get paracetamol at retail for 1c/ tablet.
Click to expand...

Because if Big Pharma can't make obscene profits, they may stop making drugs, or play games with the system. Might as well forestall all of that. Much of the cost and work of discovering new drugs is actually paid for by the tax payer anyway. and no more shell games with Big Pharma, pharmacies, doctor's offices making it hard to find good discounts on anything. A rotten system at best.
Click to expand...

I was speaking specifically to the "federal manufacturing" idea, not federal research. There's no point in the government manufacturing patent expired medicine.
 
PyramidHead said:
SimpleDon said:
There are no good things to say about chasing profit in healthcare. Profit has no added benefit to healthcare. Health care descions are best left up to doctors, not to corporate executives who's only responsibility is to màke as much profit as possible.
Click to expand...

True, but doctors who are driven by profit exist and can refuse to accept Medicare as payment. A fully socialized medical care industry is the only way to restore the social contract as it concerns people's ability to continue living.
Click to expand...

Very few doctors refuse to accept Medicare payments. The stories to the contrary are usually about doctors who don't accept any new Medicare patients because they are approaching having 25% of their patients on Medicare which means that they have to provide more information with their Medicare billing. But even this going away as more and more software packages are created to provide this information.

Yes, a fully socialized system like the system in Britain is the least expensive way to provide health care. But this is still a rarity in the world today. Most health care systems in the developed countries have achieved much lower costs by eliminating profit from their systems. It is the same idea that existed in the US until about 1970 when the hospitals were owned by charities and local governments and the insurance companies were non-profit and community rate based, the Blue Cross-Blue Shield companies for example.

It is the introduction of profits into the American system that has ballooned health care costs in the US.

Medicare for all only socializes the health care insurance industry. But that may be enough to reign in the medical costs. The primary reason that medical costs ran away was that it was the only sure way that the insurance companies could increase their profits from year to year.
 
Think the government would do a good job of ensuring a steady supply???
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Think the government would do a good job of ensuring a steady supply???
Click to expand...

If such programs are set up properly and not run by idiots or sullen political types who want to sabotage these efforts. Yes. It could even be good for private industry. Who would build the plants are sell drugs to the government. Their CEOs would not get obscenely rich, but robber baron style Big Pharma is placing drugs beyond the reach of many which is an artificially created shortage for many. When you have people dying because they cannot afford insulin and cut back on their dosages, which is happening now, it is obvious robber baron Big Pharma is not a good idea or acceptable any more. Burn that with fire.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
Think the government would do a good job of ensuring a steady supply???
Click to expand...

The government funds most of the drug research in the country, either directly or through subsidies to the drug companies. The for profit drug companies are only interested in funding research into a very narrow band of drugs and diseases. They are only interested in research into drugs that relieve the symptoms of chonic diseases that at large number of people have. They have no interest in drugs that cure a disease completely with no on going need for the drug and they aren't interested in drugs that prevent diease and they aren't interested in rare diseases that only a few people get, hence the word "rare" making fun of myself.

I feel that the government provides a steady supply of drug research, so yes, I think that they could provide an adaquate supply of drugs if they went into that business.

The manufacturing of the drugs is easy once all of the testing is done. I don't see any reason for the government to do the manufacturing either. They also pay for the majority of legal drugs in the country. If you want cheaper drugs all you have to do is to allow the government to use the tremondous buying power to lower the drug prices. They are currently prohibited from neogoating drug pricing with the companies. This is crazy.
 
SimpleDon said:
They have no interest in drugs that cure a disease completely with no on going need for the drug and they aren't interested in drugs that prevent diease
Click to expand...

You can't really believe this can you? If Pfizer found a drug that reversed Type II diabetes, do you believe any amount of power in the world could suppress the finding? Do you think all the researchers in the world working with pharmaceuticals hope they don't find a drug that could cure cancer or HIV?

You can't find a drug that controls every symptom of type II diabetes without also finding out a lot about the disease itself. Any drug (if one exists) that could cure it would be found, even if you were only looking for "permanent high-cost symptom management drugs".
 
The problem with drugs isn't in the specific of who is making them. The problem with drugs is Intellectual Property protections designed to recoup costs. The IP/R&D cost is the issue here.

My thought is that the government should have the option of buying out the R&D or IP costs of a drug similar to Eminent Domain, and then open up the rights.

This is not to say the government should take over production, but that the government should be able to force market competition.
 
Cheerful Charlie said:
Pharmaceuticals have risen in price so high that many people cannot afford the drugs they need to survive. In the US high prices and price gouging seem to be out of control. In response, there are now proposals for the US government to take over producing drugs to cut out the pharmaceutical robber barons.

https://truthout.org/articles/remov...ur-pills-the-case-for-a-public-pharma-system/

Removing the Profit From Our Pills: The Case for a Public Pharma System
...
Any American who has paid the price of a patent-protected medicine knows the core flaw in the U.S. prescription drug system: our elected leaders have handed over control to profit-hungry corporations. And for-profit corporations gonna for-profit, as the kids would say. That is especially true when the corporations are gifted with long-term monopolies on life-essential medicines, which gives them the leverage to set take-it-or-leave it prices that net billions in revenue extracted from all of us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. That is the message of an exciting new report, Medicine for All: The Case for a Public Option in the Pharmaceutical Industry, by Dana Brown, director of the Next System Project of the organization Democracy Collaborative. “We can displace corporate power over our health and lives by moving toward a democratic, publicly-owned pharmaceutical sector, designed to respond to public health needs and deliver better health outcomes at lower costs,” Brown writes.
...

This to me seems to be a good idea. It is time to accept that sometimes, the free market is the problem, not the solution.
Click to expand...

The notion of a "free market" is folly.
 
Metaphor said:
SimpleDon said:
They have no interest in drugs that cure a disease completely with no on going need for the drug and they aren't interested in drugs that prevent diease
Click to expand...

You can't really believe this can you? If Pfizer found a drug that reversed Type II diabetes, do you believe any amount of power in the world could suppress the finding? Do you think all the researchers in the world working with pharmaceuticals hope they don't find a drug that could cure cancer or HIV?

You can't find a drug that controls every symptom of type II diabetes without also finding out a lot about the disease itself. Any drug (if one exists) that could cure it would be found, even if you were only looking for "permanent high-cost symptom management drugs".
Click to expand...

"You can't really believe this can you? If Pfizer found a drug that reversed Type II diabetes, do you believe any amount of power in the world could suppress the finding?"

See weed, maybe it would just be "illegal" to study something that might be an economic threat to the bottom line. Or perhaps there just wouldn't be enough money in it for investors. We can get ya some opioids for that however.

Wall Street Admits Curing Diseases Is Bad for Business
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/wall-street-admits-curing-diseases-is-bad-for-business/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom