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It's Official! Curing Patients Is Bad for Business

From this article, subtitled, Milton Packer describes the end result of profit-dominated drug development:

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Pharmaceutical companies are developing new drugs in only two therapeutic areas these days -- cancer and rare diseases. Why? These are the only therapeutic areas where exorbitant pricing is tolerated by payers.

How exorbitant are we talking about? Most new drugs for cancer and rare diseases are being priced above $400,000 a year per patient. Some drugs are being priced at $1 million per treatment. And prices continue to soar.

As extensively discussed here, the metabolic theory of cancer, which has so much promising research behind it, stretching over one hundred years, likely has a lot going against it in places that are literally profiting via the old model of treatment.

As the article goes on to explain:

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To cover these exorbitant costs for even a small number of people, payers slash their expenditures in other therapeutic areas, and these cuts affect millions of people. For example, instead of agreeing to pay for the best treatment for diabetes for $1,500, payers approve the use of a second-rate treatment for $75. Physicians are not good at challenging payers, so most patients will get the second-rate treatment.

Eating better doesn't make the drug companies anything at all. But everyone who actually needs drugs that work are being shortchanged by this process.

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According to an article by Tae Kim on CNBC, Goldman Sachs issued a report (by Salveen Richter) that suggested that drug developers might want to think twice about making drugs that were too effective. Richter's report, entitled "The Genome Revolution," was issued on April 10 and says:

"The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies.... While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."
The translation: if you develop a new drug that cures people rapidly, then patients will not need to take the drug on an ongoing basis, and that limits the amount of money a company can make.

The analyst asks: "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"

Do they realize we can hear them? They are coming right out and saying let's keep people sick and make more money.

In conclusion:

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What do these examples teach us? We have not reached the limits of scientific innovation. But we have reached the limits of common sense and common decency.

When the most important investment banking enterprise in the world wonders whether it is a good idea to support companies that want to develop cures, we truly have reached rock bottom.

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Do they realize we can hear them? They are coming right out and saying let's keep people sick and make more money.

Well I think they have a point, though. A drug company goes through the expense of developing a few one-shot cures, if that's even possible, and then they go bankrupt. Maybe that's even the ethical thing to do, but then the remaining companies will be the ones that weren't willing to take that sacrifice. This might be where public funding should come in, because various cures besides the ethics of the thing should even benefit society as a whole financially.

It seems foolish to trust health to for-profit entities. Full stop.

UPDATE:

Comment from someone on another board.

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A bit late, perhaps, but worth noting: this is the opposite of what the actual analyst suggests. The linked article asserts that’s what the analyst suggests, but is wrong – either accidentally or intentionally misreading. I’ve read the actual analysis, and what the analyst actually suggested is to be able to cure more than one disease. The analyst says that focusing on a single cure may be financially risky, that a company that develops a cure should not rest on its laurels and should already be working on the next cure.

This is not a minor detail; it’s a completely opposite moral statement. “Cure more diseases faster”, not “stop curing diseases”.

Needed; more research on antibiotics, even if they're not a cash cow like they advertise on TV!

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Originally Posted by mike_d

Needed; more research on antibiotics, even if they're not a cash cow like they advertise on TV!

Agreed, and we need to STOP using them on our food animals because they live in such filth.

Humane treatment solves so many more problems than thinking we can shame the world into going vegan...

The Corruption of Evidence Based Medicine – Killing for Profit, Dr. Fung 4-9-2018

So here’s a damning list of all the problems of EBM

Selective Publication
Rigged outcomes
Advertorials
Reprint Revenues
Bribery of Journal Editors
Publication Bias
Financial Conflicts of Interests

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Originally Posted by s93uv3h

Yes! They co-opt the good and use it for evil.