US doctors are rationing lifesaving cancer drugs amid dire shortage | Hacker News Reader

US doctors are rationing lifesaving cancer drugs amid dire shortage

arstechnica.com

2 pointsA_D_E_P_T7 comments

> Most shortages involve low-cost, off-patent generic drugs, which have profit margins that are razor-thin to non-existent.

Drug manufacturing, and people's health, should not depend on profit margins. The free market is great for many things, but not those things which cannot go bankrupt and fail.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with the "free market." It's quite the opposite, really. It's a story about a US regulatory body foolishly regulating a foreign manufacturer into hiatus. It's not about pricing, or logistics, or tariffs -- it's about a foreign manufacturer of a critical good being unwilling and unable to comply with the US's regulatory burden. (Which was poorly thought out from the outset.)

The drug market is possibly the least "free" market in America, and for this reason, among others, it's the most dysfunctional.

The article presents many reasons why the manufacturer was a danger to health. What do you think of those reasons?

The free market includes regulation. I especially want medicines regulated! What specifically is overly burdensome about these regulations?

Try just sticking to the facts and reason. The exaggerated language is the opposite of convincing - it tells me someone is just engaged in an Internet rant.

"In general, the root causes of drug shortages are well-established. Most shortages involve low-cost, off-patent generic drugs, which have profit margins that are razor-thin to non-existent. This is driven by middlemen who have, in recent years, pushed down wholesale prices to rock-bottom levels, to the point that the generics industry often loses money on drugs. This disincentivizes pharmaceutical companies from helping to make much-needed generic drugs and creates fragile supply chains. As KFF notes, several generic makers have recently filed for bankruptcy."

Definitely, Pharmacy benefit managers are the culprit. You see the same thing in every sector: the middle men, who don't produce, squeezes the real producers.

This is an almost comically evil regulatory failure.

"W-we're going to shut down a foreign facility that produces life-saving drugs for Americans because... we don't like the way they keep records. And they evaded our authority! Sorry American cancer patients, gg, better luck next time."

Making generic drugs is a low-margin business and many if not most manufacturing facilities are as bad as that one. See, e.g., https://archive.is/ImWtW

It would be infinitely more rational to simply run batch tests on the chemicals or drugs upon import, when they're introduced into the US drug supply chain. If they're good, they're good. Simple as.

It's not that simple. Beyond checking for the active ingredient, there are a huge amount of different toxins and contaminants that could potentially be introduced by a defective manufacturing process. Just like with software, you can't test quality into pharmaceutical products. Quality assurance has to be built into the process from the start.

This is a natural result of the US capital class pushing all commodity manufacturing off shore.

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