As much as I support this action 100%, this is a pretty disingenuous argument and makes the stance against lowering drug costs look weak and not grounded in reality.
Drugs cost way more than the cost of manufacturing. R&D costs and the costs of the 95% of novel compounds that fail to yield any results are a massive expenditure that aren't factored into the "cost to make". While much of this is included in public spending because large amounts of R&D come from the public research sector, private research does spend a lot more money than just the cost it takes to make the drug once it's been discovered and approved.
The main problem is that we don't have any universal healthcare system that can use the entire population to negotiate with these companies and to order in massive bulk, like they do in Australia for example. We could also stand to copy their PBS that subsidizes the cost further for most patients.
Yeah, I used to work at a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, and in orientation I learned that the cost to develop a new drug was upwards of $1 billion. I don’t remember the exact number because this was over 20 years ago. They would soon go out of business if they could only charge the price to manufacture, and it would soon stop discovering new medicines if they couldn’t recoup their failures through making large amounts of money from their successes.
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u/m0bw0w 13h ago
As much as I support this action 100%, this is a pretty disingenuous argument and makes the stance against lowering drug costs look weak and not grounded in reality.
Drugs cost way more than the cost of manufacturing. R&D costs and the costs of the 95% of novel compounds that fail to yield any results are a massive expenditure that aren't factored into the "cost to make". While much of this is included in public spending because large amounts of R&D come from the public research sector, private research does spend a lot more money than just the cost it takes to make the drug once it's been discovered and approved.
The main problem is that we don't have any universal healthcare system that can use the entire population to negotiate with these companies and to order in massive bulk, like they do in Australia for example. We could also stand to copy their PBS that subsidizes the cost further for most patients.