Reminds me of the Man Robs Bank to get Healthcare thread.
Sometimes I question: 500k a year, is the drug manufacturer nuts? No one without insurance (even if they have, it may exceed the limit by a ton) will be able to pay for that.
Fund raising is not necessary the answer: there are a surprising amount of people who cannot afford the best treatment for themselves because of $. No fund raising effort can satisfy them all.
Sad to say, death awaits us all. If you are unlucky, it comes sooner. There is little we can do beside to try to enjoy it.
I wonder if your friend can appeal to the drug manufacturer for a discount?
Unfortunately in the current state of the world anything which involves health also involves a lot of money. Med school cost money, getting treated cost money, developing drugs cost money...
On June 23 2011 02:04 Hikari wrote: Reminds me of the Man Robs Bank to get Healthcare thread.
Sometimes I question: 500k a year, is the drug manufacturer nuts? No one without insurance (even if they have, it may exceed the limit by a ton) will be able to pay for that.
Fund raising is not necessary the answer: there are a surprising amount of people who cannot afford the best treatment for themselves because of $. No fund raising effort can satisfy them all.
Sad to say, death awaits us all. If you are unlucky, it comes sooner. There is little we can do beside to try to enjoy it.
I wonder if your friend can appeal to the drug manufacturer for a discount?
Unfortunately in the current state of the world anything which involves health also involves a lot of money. Med school cost money, getting treated cost money, developing drugs cost money...
IIRC, it's a treatment you receive every two weeks, and an expensive procedure. That's why it comes down to 500k a year.
It is very sad indeed that the cure is there, it is just very expensive. But we have to put things like this in perspective. One hundred years ago your friend would probably already be dead. One hundred years from now he would probably be able to afford the medicine. It is truly sad that he was the one born in the space of time so tantalizingly between existence of the cure and affordability, but as a race humanity has done an extraordinary job of curing diseases and extending lives.
The pharmaceutical companies have had a huge role in this process, and tons of their profits are put right back into future research and development. I dare say if the government regulated profits of these companies they would make drugs more affordable now, but less existent in the future (drugs that would exist under current laws would never be developed), causing more pain.
It seems silly that in a company that develops drugs the officers (CEO, CFO, etc) should earn millions of dollars, but they are valued for their ability to place resources in the right places. If the difference between a CEO making $1,000,000 and a CEO making $100,000 is the difference between a drug that saves 100,000 lives and a drug that saves 10,000 lives being invented, are those lives not worth $10 each? Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but it is what the market is saying. In a multi-billion dollar industry the ability to distribute resources efficiently is a skill that can easily be worth millions of dollars to a company.
The basic "problem" is that there needs to be a way for companies to recoup their R&D, but we also don't like monopoly pricing. One solution I have seen is to have the government purchase the patent for fair-market value after the pharma company completes all testing. Fair-market value can be calculated by having competing pharma companies bid for the patent, and the government can simply say, "there is a 90% chance we will buy it" in order to incentivize the bidders to do their due diligence. Then the government just releases it into the public domain.
On June 23 2011 02:04 Hikari wrote: Reminds me of the Man Robs Bank to get Healthcare thread.
Sometimes I question: 500k a year, is the drug manufacturer nuts? No one without insurance (even if they have, it may exceed the limit by a ton) will be able to pay for that.
Fund raising is not necessary the answer: there are a surprising amount of people who cannot afford the best treatment for themselves because of $. No fund raising effort can satisfy them all.
Sad to say, death awaits us all. If you are unlucky, it comes sooner. There is little we can do beside to try to enjoy it.
I wonder if your friend can appeal to the drug manufacturer for a discount?
Unfortunately in the current state of the world anything which involves health also involves a lot of money. Med school cost money, getting treated cost money, developing drugs cost money...
IIRC, it's a treatment you receive every two weeks, and an expensive procedure. That's why it comes down to 500k a year.
How many households makes 500k a year? How many parents buy medical insurance for their children that covers a 500k/year treatment? When they labelled the price tag on the drug did they make it reasonable? "Lets pray a billionaire out there gets sick enough to buy our drug so we can start making money!"
On June 23 2011 02:04 Hikari wrote: Reminds me of the Man Robs Bank to get Healthcare thread.
Sometimes I question: 500k a year, is the drug manufacturer nuts? No one without insurance (even if they have, it may exceed the limit by a ton) will be able to pay for that.
Fund raising is not necessary the answer: there are a surprising amount of people who cannot afford the best treatment for themselves because of $. No fund raising effort can satisfy them all.
Sad to say, death awaits us all. If you are unlucky, it comes sooner. There is little we can do beside to try to enjoy it.
I wonder if your friend can appeal to the drug manufacturer for a discount?
Unfortunately in the current state of the world anything which involves health also involves a lot of money. Med school cost money, getting treated cost money, developing drugs cost money...
IIRC, it's a treatment you receive every two weeks, and an expensive procedure. That's why it comes down to 500k a year.
How many households makes 500k a year? How many parents buy medical insurance for their children that covers a 500k/year treatment? When they labelled the price tag on the drug did they make it reasonable? "Lets pray a billionaire out there gets sick enough to buy our drug so we can start making money!"
Well they made $260 million last year in profits so they must have some idea what they are doing as far as pricing goes
The civil thing to do would be lower the price and hope it's worth it over time, even if it's a long time. People are too greedy though, so that would never happen. It's sickening.
it's certainly unfortunate but the medical industry cannot accomodate every type of illness present in the world, it's simply not viable. From a economic standpoint, as well as a scientific standpoint with respect to opportunity cost.
It takes years and years and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce a viable drug. Many of you don't seem to understand the magnitude of saying "why not just give it to him, that company's a jerk". Is it any different than asking adobe or microsoft to release their software for free? Not really. You might try to argue with sentimentality that the drug decision involves the life of another human but is that something you can say so simply? Given that it comes from tax dollars, what if we approached your household tomorrow and said "from now on, pay an additional fee X every month because 1 person out of 33 million in a country has a rare illness". I realize this may come across as extremely heartless to many but its simply not practical.
To further exemplify, a leading concern in the field of medical philosophy is the constant medicalization of "diseases". I say that with quotations because presently, obesity is treated as a "disease". The traditional definition of disease requires a pathogenic mechanism yet obesity is largely in part due to the decline of daily fitness and abuse of diet. That said, diabetes isn't technically a disease either. The human diet is still based on meat, nuts, tubers, fruits. The introduction of agriculture exponentially increased grain intake -> sugar intake. But this change happened to fast, and the bodies were unable to keep up -> diabetes. Now given the widespread prevalence of the above (especially in the US), what constitutes more importance in the expenditure of 1, 000, 000, 000 dollars.
To OP; i'm afraid the most your friend can do is to lobby with health companies although i truthfully do not see much reason why the companies would sponsor your friend. I'm sorry to hear about his situation.
On June 23 2011 03:39 Kenderson wrote: The civil thing to do would be lower the price and hope it's worth it over time, even if it's a long time. People are too greedy though, so that would never happen. It's sickening.
There's a lot of R&D cost that goes into developing these drugs and administer them...money goes back into R&D for other projects
On June 23 2011 03:48 Drock wrote: This is what happens when drug companies are allowed to be for profit. Honestly I think the huge drug companies are among the sleaziest in the world.
Specifically that cures to rare diseases are found and a few years later, they are readily available to everyone ? Yeah, I agree. Not with the second sentence though.
i dont really get it. Dont you have a public health system in canada?
in germany if its proven that it will help him his insurance have to pay for it. if its 500k or 500 million a year.... and if he is not in a private health insurance he is in the state health insurance and this one has to pay.
If there is not enough proof that this medicine will help they can deny the payment. in this case you have to go to curt.
EDIT: we are not living in a dreamworld. yes its fucking expensive to have such a system and yes its worth it....
On June 22 2011 12:14 Arnstein wrote: Move to Norway. You actually aren't allowed to pay more than 300 dollars each year for any kind of treatment, after the first 300 dollars it's free.
Nice that you actually believe that, but unfortunately you live in a fairytail world with rainbows and pink unicorns. If you got this illness you would most likely not get any treatment at all.
On June 23 2011 03:39 Kenderson wrote: The civil thing to do would be lower the price and hope it's worth it over time, even if it's a long time. People are too greedy though, so that would never happen. It's sickening.
You think it's cheap to develop these drugs? Well literally 3 seconds on google gave me this: Estimates about the cost of developing a new drug vary widely, from a low of $800 million to nearly $2 billion per drug. (http://www.america.gov/st/econ-english/2008/April/20080429230904myleen0.5233981.html). A drug for an extremely rare condition is going to cost A LOT because of the small pool of potential customers. Add to the fact that somewhere down that LONG TIME you're banking on, a new more effective drug could come out and obsolete that drug.
Don't worry though, I'm sure with your marvelous, sustainable business model they'll be able to save literally tens of people before they bankrupt themselves, their employees, and the company. What's sickening is your ignorance.
I think people are taking the stance "if not everybody can have it then nobody should have it" without even realizing that is the stance they are taking. Nobody is going to sink a billion dollars into developing a drug so that they can give it away for cheap. Stop dreaming.
When they put the pricetag at $500.000 do they really expect to sell the drug? i mean if this is a very rare condition, what are the odds of having this condition + being a millionaire?
On June 23 2011 04:14 Pulimuli wrote: When they put the pricetag at $500.000 do they really expect to sell the drug? i mean if this is a very rare condition, what are the odds of having this condition + being a millionaire?
Not very high i would guess.
They probably also negotiate with people and try their best to work something. But the answer is probably no, as they intend to make most of their money from insurance companies/governments instead of selling it to individuals. They've had $260 million in sales in 1 year so it appears to be getting sold.
People should be glad that there are companies willing to sink a billion dollars in to research before seeing a single cent back so that at least these drugs exist. Having these drugs exist paves the way for research in to making these drugs more affordable and efficient.
I really find the people complaining about high costs amusing as everything we have today at one point was considered exorbitant and unaffordable by 99.9% of the population. Maybe you should disparage the guy that invented fire (what? you want a bushel of berries to teach me how to build a fire? stop robbing everybody).
I don't know how things work in Canada, but in the U.S. the state grants a lot of that R&D money though the companies tally it as their expenditures. Pharmaceuticals aren't exactly scraping by as an industry here, at least. $500k/year is absolutely ludicrous, there's no question about that. I'm really sorry to hear about your friend's situation. I'm hard pressed to believe that greed isn't the reason for that outrageous price.
EPT
