Your parents medication costs more than a car payment because developing medication is expensive. Developing medication is expensive partly because it's just innately expensive, but mostly because going through the bureaucracy of getting it approved is really expensive. You want cheaper medicine? Then make that faster and cheaper. But there are tradeoffs.

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aDyslecticCrow 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

The us spends more money on healthcare per capita than any European nation (including those with tax funded healthcare). Yet the very same drugs are cheap over here. The very same drugs Europe produce, put in airplanes and fly over to the US for the US market.

Are Europe just better at R&D then? Does Europe have more lax medication regulations? That is what your argument would suggest. But i somehow doubt that.

Looking at the share prices of the top medical industry companies in the US, from insurance to medicine production to private hospitals, it would seem there is plenty of margin going elsewhere for some reason.

Are we also ignoring that a lot of medical R&D is funded by grants and government investment? Its odd how the pharmaceutical companies are sooooo strained for money from the (partially already paid for) R&D that they have to take out a 600% margin on the product to cover it for decades after the drug has been on the market.

But it's clearly the famously harsh American bureaucracy that cripples the US market compared to Europe and Asia (the very same bureaucracy that created a self inflicted opioid crisis by being overly swayed by pharmaceutical lobbying)

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bfg_9k 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think you'll find if you spend a quick second googling, that Pharma is by and large the biggest spenders of money on R&D out of every major industry as a % of revenue.

https://www.strategy-business.com/feature/What-the-Top-Innov...

And what you're failing to account for, is all of the failed research that they do that goes nowhere. Yes, they charge big margins on old drugs, however what do you think happens to all the money that gets spent on drug research that doesnt do anything?

	▲	aDyslecticCrow 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Most medical research doesn't go up in smoke if it didn't lead to a production drug. And i don't argue R&D isn't a larger portion of what pharmaceutical companies do. Although the statistics is old (2017), its interesting to compare the $2.2 billion total spent by all US healthcare companies listed (2017) compared to the $38 billion tax money spent by the NHS on research grants to medical research 2024. (80% of their budget of $48 billion) Even assuming very generous increase of the medical research budget since 2017, makes N.H.S. research grants a significant portion of medical research that the expensive drugs supposedly cover? https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget And again, this is somehow only an issue in the US. Why does European and Asian pharmaceutical companies produce cheaper drugs and cutting edge medical research as a competitive rate, if the high cost of the drugs is to needed to keep them afloat? The statistics you sent also seem to show non-us pharmaceutical companies regularly spent more % of their revenue on R&D. What gives? --- And again, i didn't single-out pharmaceutical companies specifically. I blamed all of US medical industry, from the hospital to the insurance. The pharmaceutical companies seem to charge quite reasonable prices to the insurance companies. Odd how much more it costs to buy it without insurance though (the cost is to cover R&D right?.... right?) --- I'll be even more spicy. If your goal it so save as many people as possible, and R&D truly is single-handedly the reason drugs and drugs and medical care is so expensive (which i think is blatantly incorrect); The US should just stop doing R&D entirely. You could save vastly more lives with the drugs already in existence, which is prevented because the US healthcare system is so fundamentally broken. But i don't think it would do squat because there are a lot of other things affecting the price of drugs and healthcare than that. Cutting out R&D not do squat on healthcare costs.

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terminalshort 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You may want to look at the financial statements of pharma companies before making claims like that.

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anonymous_user9 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The perverse incentives of insurance companies and an equal if not greater factor than regulator burden.

Insurance companies are not incentivized to lower costs, because it allows them to charge more. Pharmacy Benefit Managers eliminate the price bargaining power of even the largest pharmacy chains. Healthcare is complex, expensive, and required for life, which make it inherently susceptible to market distortions.

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khalic 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolute bullshit, drug prices are set according to how much they can squeeze out of it. It’s borderline dishonest to pretend the prices correspond to R&D expenditure

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dokyun 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Bullshit.