this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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I wonder if, even at this early stage of the therapy’s development, this would actually be more affordable than the alternative.
Melanoma patients are highly likely to have the cancer come back and or metastasize. Repeat treatments and hospitalizations are not cheap.
Which is why the Moderna vaccine will be priced at just 95% of the cost of the repeat treatments and hospitalization plus the value of the time saved and pain and suffering avoidance by the patient. Say, an extra half a million. I mean, what price would you put on avoiding seeing your parent or child subjected to round after round of chemotherapy?
So if this happens exactly as you describe, the net result will be a cancer treatment that is way more reliable and causes way less suffering than the existing treatments, and is slightly cheaper to boot?
That sounds awesome!
In reality they'll likely reduce the price more than that, because the balance between the supply/demand curve will likely give them even more profit if they drop it down farther. More people will be able to afford it so it'll create a bigger market. And then in a few years competitors will start coming out with their own mRNA cancer treatments and competition will start pushing it down even more.
Depends on how much time was spent on R&D. You have to recover those costs. I know everyone wants everything for free but it takes a fuck ton of man hours and tons of investments to get to this point. You can't just give it away unfortunately.
Did they pay for their own R&D? Usually that get socialized and then the profits are privatized, it's the American Way.
I like to shit on big pharma as much as the next guy, but in this case, yes they do. Developing new drugs is a ludicrously risky and expensive venture, typically costing billions of dollars. Sometimes it may be subsidized somewhat, sure, but the vast majority of it is coming out of pocket for these companies.
You seem awfully sure about that. What are you basing it on? MRNA research alone was massively funded with taxpayer money. Coding for new proteins is almost trivial compared to what went into developing the technology.
https://healthpolicy-watch.news/u-s-government-invested-31-9-billion-in-mrna-vaccine-research-and-procurement/
I use to agree with you but that metric sailed a long to me ago. All pricing, everywhere now, is based on how much they think people will pay, not cost plus a reasonable profit.
A $1300 iPhone probably cost around $200 to actually produce, and that covers development.
Any cost savings on production, or cheaper materials, is profit passed on to the stockholder. It does not go to workers and certainly does not go to a cheaper sales price.
Would somebody think of the poor pharmaceutical executives?
Yeah; it's not like it's insulin.
True, but individuals dont have to pay for that. This is 100% something that can be taxpayer funded as it pretty much benefits everyone.
Otherwise, it just becomes a penalty for poor people and another luxury for the rich.
Nearly all of the basic research is already taxpayer funded through research grants. There are still development costs (especially trials and such), but most of the money spent my large pharmaceutical companies goes into marketing. (it's been a few years, but last time I looked in the mid-teens it was more than 50% of their overall budget iirc)
You actually can. The simplest way is to literally just give the research away and charge a fair price for the medicine. That's allowed.
The slightly more capitalist way would be to sell the rights to the government to recoup costs.
The slightly less capitalist way is for the government to notify you that you don't own it anymore because of the public good.
This is also ignoring exactly how much the public already funds the basic research that goes into pharmaceuticals, which is quite a bit more than you might expect, so the argument of what's even "fair" is less clearly in favor of the company than you might expect.
There's a tricky balance.
For every endeavor that could recoup its costs in a fairly reasonable way, there are several other attempts that end in failure.
If you know that best case your project can be modestly better than break even, but it will most likely completely fail, would you invest in it?
I could respect an argument for outright socializing pharmaceutical efforts and rolling the needs into taxes and cutting out the capitalist angle entirely, but so long as you rely on capitalist funding model in any significant amount, then you have to allow for some incentive. When the research is pretty much fully funded by public funds, that funding should come with strings attached, but here it seems the lead up was largely in capitalist territory.
You're not going to get a sympathetic ear around here. Lemmy wants everything for free. Bunch of children watching capitalism literally burn the world down, but has no clue that nice things cost effort, and effort = $.
Now if you want to talk about making drug advertisements illegal, I'm all in. Wouldn't that make a wonderful impact? Make big pharma put the money into R&D that they put into ads.
That's what my taxes are for. I rarely pay more than $5 for medication, if anything. I also pay significantly less in taxes than US citizens and have less potholes in the roads.