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Yes! And if you think that’s evil, wait til you find out about dynamic pricing;
Charge people differently; setting the price to the maximum that each can handle…
That is at the core of modern capitalism; maximizing profits. yes it is too bad so sad that some people die; they should have worked harder to have gotten better jobs
Fucking surreal that people actually think like this.
Even worse it is allowed, and even celebrated.
Charging wealthier people higher prices and subsiding the less wealthy sounds great! I figure that with the profit motive, it's all gone to shit though.
It would be great IF it were used to subsidize; but no.
“Flog that profit margin harder for Daddy!”
I'm on a generic of truvada as a preventative. 30 days can be $1500-2000 for name brand no insurance. I get mine for $5 and somehow my insurance, the pharmacy, and the manufacturer are all still making enough money off that $5 to not complain. How the fuck are they getting away with the $2k pricetag
I take Xolair, which is billed at about $5k for four syringes. Insurance pays $4875 and the Xolair copay program, run by the manufacturer, pays $125. Why are they so willing to pick up the copay? Before four syringes of Xolair cost about $60 in total to produce.
Because the insurance company already paid them way more than it's really worth. And if the insurance company has agreed to pay that much, it's because they're making more than enough profit off their "service" to everyone that they can afford to pay it.
If your medicine used to cost $60 and now costs $5000 thst's because the insurance company knows they can get that money from its customers.
If they sell you pay $5 for the drug and the next person in line pays $2k for the same drug, they are making $1k per patient. They are also writing off the $3k that they could be charging you as a charitable contribution, so they don't have to pay taxes on the income. They hope that if they keep you alive, some day you will make enough money to pay full retail price.
Subsidies for low income users
Medical science: with this we could cure everyone in earth of the disease for only $20!
Pharmaceutical industry: Okay that goes in the vault forever. Now make us one that just treats the symptoms and we'll charge $5,000 a month for it.
This would be terrible business if any pharma worked this way. The vast majority of potential treatments fail either in the lab or in early phase trials. It is not very likely that'd you'd be able to on-demand develop a novel treatment for symptoms before one of your competitors figured out your already-discovered cure. That would be unless you patented the cure, but by the time you spent years developing a new symptom-only treatment and testing it through each phase, you'd have a few years at best before your exclusivity on the cure patent expires and thus your treatment becomes worthless.
Pharmas are run by the same short-sighted wall streeters as every other corporation. Actually successfully executing this sort of long-term plan would require thinking further ahead than a few quarters, which they are not capable of doing. A new cure is a big stock boost now that they could never resist.
It was a hypothetical. In reality they're not finding many actual cures in the first place because they're seeking rents not cures.
Rent seeking is not applicable for any company developing new medicines because that by definition is creating new wealth. I wouldn't disagree with that characterization for any company milking an out-of-patent treatment by trying to make it unfeasible for any other company to manufacture it. You are correct that does exist.
Cures are difficult to develop due to how variable human physiology is, but we still manage to do so. Vaccines are also a way more effective instrument for disease eradication; it's better to prevent anyone getting the disease in the first place.
Theres an economic theory used to set prices called Supply:Demand Equilibrium wherein you maximize profit by calculating a curve and generating a table where the axis are number of buyers and price bought at.
If the good is a necessity then you can expect a large number of people will buy it regardless of how high the price is, if they have the money, giving the incentive to set the prices higher despite having less demand at that price range.
It's better, from a capitalist's pov, to sell something to a single person for a grand than it is to sell to a hundred for a dollar. Especially if that keeps misery high.
Imagine prior to Obama Care where an insurance company could deny you for having a preexisting condition.
It was so bad that companies could kick you off of insurance mid-treatment for something like cancer and then deny you for having a pre-existing condition.
Its even still better than if they asked thousands of patients a dollar.
Less overhead.
Oh no, I just looked it up and learned that I get my multi-thousand dollar per month medication for free thanks to a program sponsored by Nestle. I feel dirty. But I also need my medication.
Look at it differently, you're taking advantage of Nestlé. They're trying to make themselves look better with the program and adding one more person to their list of "who we've helped" won't really have any impact on their attempt to sanitize themselves or their taxes. It will, however, have a big impact on you.
Just don't start telling everyone that nestle is paying for your meds. That would be helping them with their image.
You know, your comment was very helpful.
I know that all of these megacorps sponsor all sorts of philanthropic causes for PR and tax purposes. But I also know how evil Nestle is and I don't find it difficult to not buy their products. ...until I just looked up who's paying for my meds.
But thank you, you are right. I'm using up their money and giving them nothing back.
Lots of people only ever get the chance to say "Fuck Nestle." But you? You get to live the dream!
They can ask til theyre blue in the face but until the governments step in and force them, nothing will change
They're goal is to sell to each person for exactly the most that they can get the person to pay.
A lot of people get the medication through insurance, meaning they're just gouging another leach.
The insurance will pay because the medicine is just cheaper than what it would cost them if you didn't get it.
If you don't have insurance, they have programs to try to gouge you at more plausible rates that they refer to in compassionate language.
If you're a third world, they try to price gouge in terms affordable for the market.
About the only place they charge a fair price is in places they think the government might just set price ceilings.
But if they have more customers then they have to spend more resources making more product. So 1 customer at 1000x the price is more valuable than 1000 customers at the a lower price. If it costs 28 dollars to make a year's worth of doses like this screenshot claims, then they'd make $42,222 charging a single customer the current price, while they'd only make $12,000 charging 1,000 customers the proposed price.
So for the company to make more money than they are now, they'd need 3,519 new customers for every one current customer. Since Google says there are 1.2 million people with HIV in the United States, if they have more than 342 current customers in the united states, they are making more now than they could ever make at the proposed price. Therefore the amount of new customers is almost certainly not worth it to them.
Money seems to ruin pretty much everything about healthcare.
Thanks for the answer, sucks that it works that way
It doesn't work that way at all.
Pricing strategy generally calls for optimizing return. They calculated that this company has 342 customers. Each customer adds $28 in costs. The unknown is how many additional customers will choose to buy at a particular price point.
If we halve the price paid by the customer (and add $28 to account for our increased costs) will we at least double our customer base to 684?
If we halve that price again (and add another $28), will we at least double our customer base again, to 1368?
At some point, lowering the price any further will not gain enough customers,, and that is the minimum price we can charge while maintaining our current profits. The article went well beyond that point, contemplating a price point that would provide only 30% of their current profits.
If they lowered their price point to, say, $2700/yr, they would only need to add about 5100 new customers to break even with their $42,222 price. I think they would attract a hell of a lot more than 5100 new customers at that price point, meaning they would be radically increasing their revenue and profits. They are currently earning far less than they could be by demanding so much.
Just to expand your math in a different direction, going from 342 customers to 684 adds $9576 in costs, but cuts the price by 1/2 (plus $28). $21,139.
Going from 684 customers to 1368 adds another $19152. They break even at a $10,598 price point.
From 1368 to 2736 customers adds another $38304 in costs, but reduces the break even price point to $5327.
From 2736 to 5472 customers, another $76608 in costs, and a break even price point of $2685.
They are recouping all their additional costs, and making exactly the same profit charging 5472 people $7/day instead of 342 customers $115/day.
How many of those 1.2 million HIV patients can afford $7/day? If just 1% of them are willing to pay $7 a day, they will more than double their profits.
Hey, you, yeah you, with the pill press, pill binder, and bag of ~~meth~~ "adderall." Can you press up some of these? They'll sell, you'll be RICH and less likely to be busted because if they test for "drugs" it's clean. You can even keep selling meth too!
When the choice is die or be price gouged, people take the second option. Insurance likely pays this all in weird ways too. I'm sure some numbers were crunched to work out how many people they let die and how much more profit it'll make them.
The government foots a lot of the bills, so patients need to apply for medical assistance. At least the people I've known.
You can make $12 selling it to 100,000 or you can make $42,000 selling it to 29 people and make more.
Bro, were you born in a socialist barn or something?
I don't live in America