this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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No medicines have copyrights, but they do have patents. And, drug patents are kinda necessary if you want money to be spent on developing new drugs.
No one is going to dump a few hundred million into developing a new drug if everyone can manufacture and sell it upon release.
Patents aren't the issue, though, it's companies charging out the ass because they can.
Publicly funded research is out of the question then? Why does it have to be private corporations doing the research?
A state doesn't have this kind of money to burn. If they did it, the money would have to come from somewhere. So either you increase taxes, decrease spending elsewhere, or start a business making a lot of money. Such as, say, selling the newly developed medications at a markup... It's sad, but I'm not aware of a better way.
That being said, the cost of medications in the US is utterly ridiculous.
Except as highlighted, if the drug didn't make a return on investment it wouldn't be made. That can be true for government funded research, it's not necessary to have a profit margin on top.
To add to this, better drugs pay for themselves, because then public healthcare doesn't need to pay for more ineffective treatments. Having fewer sick people also improves productivity and the economy.
You don't need profit in the sense of making lots of extra money compared to how much money you actually put in. I would be very interested in how much net profit is compared to gross in relative numbers. It's a lot in absolute numbers, but I suspect not so much in relative. The problem why drug development is so very expensive is that you don't just pay large sums for the drugs that are developed, but also for all those that are not, because they prove not useful during the testing. And there is way, way more than the successful ones, perhaps 100 to 1? I don't have numers at hand. So in the end, you have to charge a lot of extra money above the production cost if you want to have enough money to develop any drugs at all.
Of course, that isn't true for old drugs. Which is a reason why generics are so much cheaper. And also why patents need to exist.
I'm sure pharma companies abuse the system as much as they can, but not as much as it might appear at a first glance.
This paper suggests you're spot on that they're not as profitable as other large companies, but they're still making an awful lot of money on top of the necessary costs.
Wow, thank you, this is a great source! So less than 90% of the income is used to run the companies and do all the R&D. Honestly, that's less than I thought and shows how greedy they are. If I read it right, they are more profitable than other large companies. Wow. So a state-owned non-profit pharma company could in theory produce new medicine 10 % cheaper and still be fine. Provided that state-owned company could be as efficient as a private one...
Sorry, you're quite right - I misread it to begin with.
Oh, the patent expired? No problem, we'll just methylate the structure, see that it makes no difference and put it out on the market as a new drug. Or maybe take the active part of a racemic mixture and half the dosage. Same drug double the patent. Semisynthetic insulin is even worse in that regard.
You won't sell it on the market because you have to produce it cheaper or at the same cost as the competition. You don't have the knowledge to produce the drug efficiently, and you can't learn that by looking at the end product. In a society without IP, the most important things are the optimised production processes, which will be kept secret. The rest can be copied because it will be more expensive to produce.