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275 points swores | 1 comments | 25 Apr 24 12:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source

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squigz ◴[26 Apr 24 20:02 UTC] No.40173571[source]▶

For those in favor of drug companies charging exorbitant amounts of money for life-saving medication in order to recoup their R&D costs (and we'll be generous and believe their reasoning and numbers)... it follows that, once they've recouped their costs, they should lower the price, right?

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1. tmnvdb ◴[26 Apr 24 20:17 UTC] No.40173741[source]▶

>>40173571 #

Unfortunately not, It follows that we set the length of drug patents at a high enough level that, on average, drug companies can continue their work of inventing drugs.

In other words, they will sometimes make a unseemly profit on a monopoly position, but at least the existence of that possibility creates the incentive for development of drugs.

The alternative is to kill the whole industry.

Sorry - the world is not ideal.

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Cost of developing new drugs may be lower than industry claims: trial