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Comment by tamaharbor | Hacker News Reader

I do a GoodRx price check of every drug I see advertised on TV. There is typically no drug that costs less than $5k a month. Is there a problem here?

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Most prescribed drugs are generics that will cost you a couple bucks. The drugs advertised on TV are precisely the ones with high margins that support expensive customer acquisition efforts.

Yeah. New Drugs are 'new', have probably just gone through expensive R&D and Trial periods, so there is a need to recoup investment.

Of course, there's the problem of when companies make a 'new' drug that is very similar to an existing drug/generic that already exists. A great example of that in my head is how Cymbalta is not that much different than Effexor.

The most egregious was when the CFC ban went into place and the non-CFC inhalers were all under patent again.

Yes. The problem is allowing pharmaceutical products to be advertised directly to consumers. That’s only legal in 2 countries — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer_advertising

As a consequence, many large drug companies spend more money marketing drugs than developing them — https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2019/7/...

But if there wasn't an opportunity to market them directly to people, many drugs would never have been made at all.

Excellent. I would argue strongly that it’s an anti-pattern if literally the only way to sell a drug is to market it to people directly. This is the essence of consumer marketing — it only fulfills needs that it first creates, e.g., “Your breath is disgusting and people mock you behind your back, so use this mouthwash.”

That's kind of the default, "let's be cynical", viewpoint, don't you think? Some people do have awful breath. Lots of old men couldn't get an erection. Certainly you aren't claiming that diabetes, arthritis, or depression are not a real issues to be treated? Today I saw a commercial for a shingles vaccine. All I know about shingles is that David Letterman got it and it kept him off the air for a while and he said it was miserable. I'd certainly consider getting a vaccine.

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