Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway35777 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

I get that point, but given that Ozempic sells for significantly less in other countries I think it's worth considering why it's that much more expensive in the US

Exactly this. And it’s because the US consumer is paying for the R&D on drugs for the rest of the world. We could balance this out a bit by passing a law that says the retail cost of a drug in the US can’t be any higher than the median of the EU + Canada (or something approximating the set of developed economies).

I do get that point, but I'm not sure it would actually work

Drug prices in the US are, in part, higher because FDA requirements are much, much stricter so it's more difficult to actually get a drug approved. It's simply more expensive to launch a product in the US, so if it becomes less profitable it might not be worth the risk for companies

You could also risk that drug companies launch an analogue of the effective compound in the US to circumvent such a regulation, since it would be two different drugs

The reason it's cheaper in Europe is in some part due to having single payer healthcare, which mean that there's a single entity negotiating purchase prices for the entire country, which improves bargaining power significantly

It's because those other countries are free riders.

I think we should do the same thing in reverse on limiting CO2 emissions. How does that sound?

Can you elaborate on how other countries are free riders?

It's not like the board at Novo has a board meeting where they decide "we hate the US so lets charge them more for our products"

The simple fact is that the US has higher drug prices because it has created a healthcare system that allows pharmaceutical companies to charge much more for their products

The way to lower drug prices is to change the system to prevent that

They have monopsonies. The drug maker has a choice of either losing some operating profit or going along with the price they set. The free riding is in these countries not paying a price that pays their share of the development cost of the drug.

The US made a decision to prioritise corporations over their citizens

I get that it's easier to blame other countries for "free-riding", than to acknowledge that the US itself is to blame for the way it has decided to structure itself

If the population in the US want affordable healthcare, then they need to fight for it. That's what we did in Europe

These companies are not selling drugs at loss in these countries. And these countries are not forcing the sale of drugs in the first place. The companies choose to take some profit over none. That does not make smarter countries that do negotiation anyway free riders.

Indeed, they are not selling the drugs at a price that is below their marginal costs. But they are also not selling drugs at a price that compensates them for the development cost, including the cost of drugs that didn't reach the market. They are free riding on this latter part.

That's a pretty strong claim. Do you have a source for that?

Since the price of Ozempic in France is 1/10th the price in the US, you either admit France is not paying their share of the development costs, or you think the US price is way excessive even taking development into account.

The price is not set to solely recoup the development cost. It's set to produce a profit. Secondly, Novo has probably made sales for around 80-100 billion dollars for Wegovy and Ozempic at this point. Given that 20%-25% of that are from sales in the EU, that's somewhere along the lines of 16-25 billion dollars, more than enough to recapture the cost of development already

The price in the US is higher because the US has created a system, that prioritise corporate interests above that of the individual. The price of these drugs are low in Europe because the population fought for affordable healthcare (among other things)

I definitely think that the price of healthcare in the US is excessive, not just the price of Ozempic. The reason for that is not that other countries are free-riding, but because the US voters continuously have voted for politicians that put corporate interests above those of their constituents

Healthcare providers in the US are free to band together to improve their bargaining power when purchasing drugs, just like most countries in the EU does

That'll however require that the US starts electing officials who actually work in the interest of the public

Isn't everything healthcare-related much more expensive in the US?

It is, which is why I think it's silly to focus on a single drug, when I think it's a pretty obvious systemic issue in how the US has structured its healthcare system

They almost certainly didn’t cure obesity. Food manufacturers are already scrambling to figure out how to make foods even more compelling and less satiating.

Regression to the mean, and our grocery selection will suffer further.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com