Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by vdaniuk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

vdaniuk

>Lets also not forget that if you can't make money off lifesaving drugs, you also won't bother to invent any new ones

Citation needed. Extremely needed.

Counter-anecdote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk

edit: wording

View on HN

If you can make exploitative profits from old drugs why risk your money making new ones?

Are you saying I'm wrong, and that that pharma companies and others will donate hundreds of billions of dollars to drug development purely out of altruism?

Or are you simply claiming that a small number of examples exist, therefore my claim doesn't follow as a hard and fast rule but merely as a trend?

It's not exactly a fine line between altruism and price gouging, there is a huge scala of options in between. I find your comments in this thread hard to rhyme with your recent post about medical tourism. After all, if not for generics and your ability to move temporarily to a country where medical care is affordable you'd be out a very large amount of money over and beyond what you paid for your treatment. Clearly - for you - medication and care where you live is too expensive and you too would have benefited from more affordable medication and care.

I'm not sure why you find my comments hard to rhyme.

In this thread I'm claiming that if you make it harder to make a profit off lifesaving drugs, people will probably invest their money elsewhere and produce fewer such drugs. Reduced demand (or price ceilings) lower quantity produced.

In the other thread I claimed that if you consider alternate sellers of medical labor, you can get a lower price. Increased supply lowers price and increases quantity provided.

Both of these claims are just classic Econ 101.

If medical tourism was not an option for me I'd have paid full price in the US and considered myself extremely lucky to have the option to trade money for the ability to do sex positions besides "girl on top, me not moving". I hardly think I'm alone - how many people would be willing to give up all medical procedures invented since 1970 in return for lower prices?

But the problem lies in the fact that for 'medical tourism' to be an option at all you first have to achieve a certain amount of wealth and your social situation has to be one where you can just pack-up-and-leave for an x amount of time without your life ending up in disarray upon your return. For many people these are not options because of money in the first place so they would not be able to pay the full price in the US to begin with.

It's just another wealth-begets-more-wealth story, your jump off point is already one of considerable privilege, one that relatively few people in the US have.

If I bought a round trip US->India->US ticket (I didn't, I stayed in India), that would have been about $1000 at most. Hotel + food another $1000. Surgery $2000. Lets round up to $5k.

$5k is not a lot of money even for lower middle class USians. (Lower class USians have medicaid.)

It's true that many Americans live up to the limit of (or beyond) their means. Even if someone earning $25k cuts his consumption down to $20k, he'll still be living a vastly better life than almost everyone in India. It's true that being born in the US, and being able to trade 20% of your income one year for the ability to walk again, is a massive privilege.

Wealth inequality may be a problem broadly but it doesn't invalidate his argument about incentives in drug production.

I don't agree with this false choice, re. "how many people...since 1970 in return for lower prices". To extend the ridiculous analogy to you and medical tourism, by not supporting the medical industry in the US and paying exorbitant prices, you are choosing to give up all US medical advances since 1995.

It can't be this drastic. Remember, the medicines are being invented by people who I believe to some significant extent are motivated by the desire for research and to improve the human condition. Witness all of the smart doctors who join, voluntarily, organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and go to the harshest places in this world to provide medical treatment for all.

I am not attacking you or your enjoyable write-up earlier but I had to comment on this false choice. I observe this same dogmatic behavior when people compare agile vs "waterfall" - it just makes no sense to me because I just don't think the world is ever this black and white.

The point I'm making is that prices are high but we are getting valuable things in return for high prices. I.e., we pay 5x the cost for 10x the value. Prices are high not due to inflation or someone getting ripped off, but because we want to buy awesome yet expensive things.

I.e., what I'm disagreeing with is the contention that "medication and care where you live is too expensive".

(Jacquesm is also assuming I lived in the US last year when I had my surgery, but in fact I was homeless and spent most of my time overseas.)

That assumption was based on the data in your article.

vdaniuk wrote and then deleted: "'Lets also not forget that if you can't make money off lifesaving drugs, you also won't bother to invent any new ones' Citation needed. Extremely needed. Counterfact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk"

Here: http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3....

NB: the higher the price, the higher the quantity supplied

Not sure why you're seeing it as deleted. It was edited

s/counterfact/counter-anecdote/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10751262

You mean "counter-anecdote"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com