Comment by cjfd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjfd | Hacker News Reader

It may very well be quite true that the price of insulin is too high but price controls really are not that great. If the price now is to high, $100 probably still is too high. Also, in the more general case (not for insulin, obviously) pharma does need to recover its research costs and who is going to say what is a good price and what not. You know, capitalism actually kind of works and price controls just don't.

There actually is a capitalist solution to the problem of high medicine prices. That is for pharma companies to have to post a price of their patents. And when somebody is willing to pay that price they do get the patent for exactly that price. After that you tax the value of the patents at a somewhat high percentage. This way, if the price of the medicine is to high relative to the posted value the state or perhaps the insurance companies could just buy the patent. On the other hand if the price of the patent is too high relative to the price of the medicine there is no real problem. In the case where both are too high but it is not the case that one is higher than the other the state should just funnel the money that comes in through the tax back to whoever needs to buy the medicine at a the high price.

except it doesn't in this case. Manufacturers keep the price artificially high by continually patenting more and more esoteric parts of the manufacturing of this drug. They then cross license the patents to each other, preventing any third party from joining the marketplace.

Insulin is NOT rocket science, and it's necessary for some people to live. It's almost as simple to make as beer. It is unreasonable that people don't have access to such a simple life saving drug.

Fuck the pharma companies. Fuck the patent system for keeping it this way. Congratulate the legislature who is tackling this problem.

You know, dropping f bombs is not a very mature way to engage in discussion.

I agree, though, that it should also become harder to get patents. If a useful invention depends on more than one or, at most, two patents the patents mainly serve as friction to innovation. A corrollary of this is that software patents should not exist. Perhaps there could also be a process where it is asserted that a medicine can only depend on one patent. Whenever it depends on more than one it should be adjudicated which of them is the innovative one and the other ones should not apply. This will solve the cross licensing problem that you notice.

You're way overthinking this.

What needs to happen is, again and again with health care issues, transparency.

Manufacturers should be required to declare and with audits prove how much they're spending to manufacture everything. Then everyone can see the price they're being charged and figure in their head what sort of markup they are being charged.

Then we can start to push back on the companies need to recoup primarily marketing costs and dividends and bonus programs and all the other padding that they have built up over decades of never being held accountable.

Should anyone buying that insulin have to divulge how much money they make a year and what other things they spend their money on, so that the manufacturer can figure out how much to charge?

Nope. I don't think patient details are required for determining an equitable markup per drug. It's the companies that are relying on the relative invisibility of their pricing decisions that have all the power in the current dynamic.

A reasonable percentage can be arbitrated once the process is in public view.

Exactly what does the accountability process look like? Angry newspaper articles? We've got plenty of those. Boycotting their products? You realise we're talking about insulin, right?

Actually, I think in practice my solution is much simpler than yours. For yours to work it is a precondition that these audits are of good quality. Perhaps they will be and perhaps not but at the very least we can note that the pharma companies have large incentives to game them. Also, the question becomes how much of a markup is reasonable. Clearly, for more innovative research more markup would be acceptable than for less innovative research if both of these would lead to working medicine. Innovativeness would need to be quantified for each and every medicine separately. This does not sound like an easy task.

I really am surprised that I am getting more downvotes than upvotes here. I think people are too emotional about this. I also note that a post dropping f-bombs is not getting downvoted which it really should be. It is not very mature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com