I cannot believe this.

[malovich]

Because the free market is the answer to everything and the profit motive should drive us all.

You know, this government thing might not be such a bad idea. 

Comments

[ancalagon_tb]

A year or 2 ago, it was revealed that the pharmaceutical industry (I dont' remember the exact numbers, but they were very close to the following) spent about 25 billions on R&D and 50 billions on marketing. So yeah, that 100$ pill you just took? that's mostly to pay for commercials...

So yeah, little pity from this quarter.

[malovich]

I am constantly stunned that Americans somehow equate profit with fiscal responsibility as a valuable equivalence.

Pharma should have taken their burst of market success and turned it into new research and a strategy to sustain themselves to stay solvent until they could get the next generation of drugs on the market. Their current strategy was to 'tweak' current formulae enough to be able to patent it as 'something else' and market it for the /exact same task/. This is where the patent resolution process actually matters to them in terms of time; some claims may be rejected, others may take years to resolve...and in the meantime their current batch of patents run out.

Makes me wonder what other sources of research were available to them and what would have happened if they were more forward thinking and just a bit less profit-driven.