Generic drugs in the US are too cheap to be sustainable, experts say | Hacker News Reader

Generic drugs in the US are too cheap to be sustainable, experts say

theguardian.com

10 pointsPaulHoule7 comments

Maybe Big Pharma should spend less money on advertising (and stock buybacks) than they spend on research

https://www.csrxp.org/icymi-new-study-finds-big-pharma-spent...

You got me curious, because I was thinking M&A wasn’t under R&D which is preferred way for Big Pharma to acquire more drugs, but I’ll be damned…GAO report said they’re raking it in. [1]

1. https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-18-40.pdf

I doubt there is advertising for generic drugs.

How is a $25 life saving medication "too cheap"? That's 1/10 of the out-of-pocket maximum per year in Norway or Sweden. Which by the way covers all of medical visits, hospital stays, prescriptions.

This is actually pretty interesting. Generic drug manufacturing has relatively high barriers to entry, but relatively low margins because there's no way for brands to command a premium. Standardized insurance costs work to prevent price discovery, and consequently you end up with supply shocks, especially for drugs that are difficult to store.

Even given dictatorial power over the FDA I'm still not sure exactly what I would do to untangle the swirl of incentive problems here.

> I’m still not sure exactly what I would do

Use statistical modeling to determine the likely need for various generic drugs over time, and hire generic producers to make enough to accommodate that need, leveraging feedback loops to adjust the quantities and types of what’s ordered?

Why is it that people think a large corporation is perfectly capable of “enterprise resource planning” but when it comes to a government agency suddenly it’s “central planning” and therefore impossible?

They may be cheap, but they're not good quality. I've found Teva, Mylan, and Sandoz to be effective. A lot of the weird stuff from India that CVS uses just doesn't work. I'm stuck with using CVS as they own Aetna.

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