Quote Originally Posted by HoreTore View Post
That's why we nationalize, Husar
I actually had that part in my post but thought it might be too distracting for some.

Quote Originally Posted by Sir Moody View Post
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.