Quite possible the largest alternative health scam ever.

[HoreTore]

386 euros for a small wooden block.

It's a good thing we have decent and honest people to treat us instead of the evil BigPharma who just want your money.

I've wasted a fortune by burning wood chippings over the years.

[Husar]

386 euros for a small wooden block.

It's a good thing we have decent and honest people to treat us instead of the evil BigPharma who just want your money.

I've wasted a fortune by burning wood chippings over the years.

I got your snide remark, which is not to say that it was aimed at me.

Can you explain how "BigPharma" can take known medications off the market, release the exact same ones again under a different name, supposedly to treat a different illness (because that it works agains the other illness was only discovered recently) and use these "added benefits" to justify a price increase from 30€ to somewhere around 800 IIRC? If they do that sort of thing out of the goodness of their hearts, then I'll take the wood for 400 bucks, thankyouverymuch.

I don't think that BigPharma is out to kill us all, but if they make trillions or thereabouts with expensive chemotherapy and someone invents a pill that solves cancer for 5 bucks per patient and has hardly any side effects, I wouldn't trust BigPharma to promote it.

Let's not forget that one side being wrong does not automatically make the other side right.

Also, here's a link with selectively chosen quotes: http://www.technologyreview.com/feat...-of-two-drugs/

$841 for two pills a day

And so in determining the price for a drug, companies ask themselves questions that have next to nothing to do with the drugs’ costs. “It is not a science,” the veteran drug maker and former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer told me. “It is a feel.”

They really don't want anyone's money, just as much as they can get away with from people who cannot survive not paying it.

[HoreTore]

That's why we nationalize, Husar

[Sir Moody]

As someone with connections to "Big Pharma" (my father works for Merck pharmaceuticals) what you aren't getting Husar is drugs aren't sold at their cost price - some drugs are made artificially cheaper by Governments (even to a point where they make a loss on producing the drugs) - this is done on a "illness by illness" basis, this means the same drug may be cheaper to cure one thing not because the drug is actually cheap but because the Governments regulate the price.

A good example of this is antibiotics - the price of antibiotics is highly regulated which means producing new antibiotics (which is a VERY expensive process) isn't cost effective at all - and hence we have new strains of antibiotic resistant infections with no new drugs to treat them with...

Of course it could just be plain greed (no industry is immune to that)...

[Sigurd]

Yeah... BigP factors in research cost into the final price of the pill. If there is a great demand, this medicine should be cheaper pr pill. I said should but that is not always the case.
Medicine are patented for a specific time, but in many cases when this time is up the medicine is discontinued whereas it could greatly benefit e.g. Africa.

My wife works at a hospital pharmacy and at the department making medicine for cancer patients.
Some of the medicine is so specific or has such a narrow "target group" that it costs over 100 000 NoK (~ €12 000) for a single dose. Imagine the stress of the lab technician who handles the jar of powder worth millions and if made wrong when diluting a dose, it needs to be thrown out.

[Husar]

That's why we nationalize, Husar

I actually had that part in my post but thought it might be too distracting for some.

As someone with connections to "Big Pharma" (my father works for Merck pharmaceuticals) what you aren't getting Husar is drugs aren't sold at their cost price - some drugs are made artificially cheaper by Governments (even to a point where they make a loss on producing the drugs) - this is done on a "illness by illness" basis, this means the same drug may be cheaper to cure one thing not because the drug is actually cheap but because the Governments regulate the price.

A good example of this is antibiotics - the price of antibiotics is highly regulated which means producing new antibiotics (which is a VERY expensive process) isn't cost effective at all - and hence we have new strains of antibiotic resistant infections with no new drugs to treat them with...

Of course it could just be plain greed (no industry is immune to that)...

I quoted a guy saying that drugs are not sold at theit cost price and you tell me that I don't get that drugs are not sold at their cost price?

Does that mean a drug that should cost 800€ is sold for 30€ to a smaller number of people for years and noone had a problem with the company making a 730€ loss with each sale? Possibly even a bigger loss since 800€ is the price they apparently calculated for selling it on an even larger market due to the newly found benefits for other patients. IMO if that were the case, they could have just pulled the original drug even earlier since noone stopped them from doing that.

There is some government regulation going on, but most of it regards the medication that insurers have to pay for if there are several similarly effective products on the market.

And yes, research cost is factored into every product, but the question remains whether betting/investing money on people getting desperately sick and being forced to buy an ailment is actually such a great idea and cannot be abused to increase the ROI. Insurances only serve as a partial counter to that problem since there are usually points where they can refuse to pay.

The only solution is to nationalize the entire health industry, get rid of all the administrative overhead that insurances produce and deliver the medications directly to the people via tax funding that replaces the current insurance fees.

[Sir Moody]

I actually had that part in my post but thought it might be too distracting for some.
Does that mean a drug that should cost 800€ is sold for 30€ to a smaller number of people for years and noone had a problem with the company making a 730€ loss with each sale? Possibly even a bigger loss since 800€ is the price they apparently calculated for selling it on an even larger market due to the newly found benefits for other patients. IMO if that were the case, they could have just pulled the original drug even earlier since noone stopped them from doing that.

As I said before the prices are regulated by government - however Governments have a hard time persuading the companies to make a loss on some products so instead they make a "deal" - the deal is basically they have to charge X for drugs treating illness Y however they are allowed to gouge on treatments for illness A - if it is later discovered X can also treat A then the price will go up to cover the costs of other regulated products (the whole rebranding thing is the way they are allowed to do this)

So yes the companies have a problem with making a loss on a particular sale but they cover it by gouging on another type entirely to cover the costs.

Having now read the article you linked (sorry didnt see the link first time through ) it seems the US system is even more complicated by insurance companies getting to pick which drugs they cover... just another good reason to keep insurance companies out of health care imo...

[HoreTore]

the question remains whether betting/investing money on people getting desperately sick and being forced to buy an ailment is actually such a great idea and cannot be abused to increase the ROI.

False fear.

People are already getting desperately sick, there is no need for the drug companies to make people ill to increase profits. And speaking of profits; BigPharma profits are not larger than any other profit in the same location. It's big in absolute numbers, but that's because the industry is large, not because the profit percentage is big.

Alternative health practitioners, on the other hand, do create "diseases" which they can then sell people expensive wooden blocks to "cure". Having "a low aether", for example, is a perfect example of a condition designed specifically to take money from people.