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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Private people invested a lot of money to develop this and get it through testing. Allowing them to reap the benefits from their investment for a limited time is just fine.

It's not people couldn't also: Diet, exercise, choose veggies, eat more fiber, etc

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Those things also require more willpower than taking a medication. Willpower is generally determined by your particular psychology which is determined by genetics and environmental factors. People don't have a choice in the matter as much as your comment seems to imply. Getting GLP-1s to everyone who could benefit from them is extremely important for overall health.

Protecting it before generic is fine, but the pricing doesn't make sense.

If it's $1000 per month cost per person when it's the name brand, how many people are on it? At this point just the diabetics and people with really good insurance?

Wouldn't they make a hell of a lot more money selling it for $100 during their protected period to 1000x the people.

They have direct discount programs where they sell at ~ half price.

True, but also still absurdly high. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly cost roughly $500 monthly... but the price is almost the same regardless of the dosage (from say 0.5mg to 2.4mg).

The public also invested a lot of money.

"Sorry bro gonna let you die because, muh investments, you see"

Your closing remark is overly simplistic and offers a contradiction: if those things would work for these obese people, they wouldn't need GLPs.

The laws of thermodynamics apply to everyone equally.

Where in thermodynamic principles does it suggest money ought to flow into the pockets of the few?

The standard for medical interventions usually isn’t “could it work?” or “should it work?” but “does it work?”

This is why the efficacy of every single contraceptive method isn’t way higher than it is. Lots of them should work almost perfectly… but the harder they are to use correctly, the less effective they in-fact are.

Eating less, exercising more, has worked for the entire existence of human race. In fact, it worked for me just fine too. GLP-1s are a safe and proven tool and should be used wherever appropriate to assist people. Both of these are simple facts that aren't in contradiction with either other.

But saying the patent owners shouldn't be allowed to reap the benefits of their investment is ridiculous, especially when it's completely possible to lose weight in other ways. 6 years isn't that long to wait anyway.

just want to point out it's not just for obesity

GLP-1 has been demonstrated to even cure some types of long-covid in some people in some cases

and various other diseases

but it's priced way out of reach even for micro-doses until it becomes generic

so all those cases suffer until 2030, if they make it that far, five years is a long time

Kind of weird to assume other people think it's fine to exchange human lives for money.

Is it ethical for me to pay someone to murder you? Does it matter if it costs me a large amount of money or not?

This is a great example of a straw-man attack.

No, it is not. They said that since someone, which is typically a fictive person, had spent a lot of money, they deserve to restrict physical persons' access to supposedly life saving substances.

I would like to know how far they take that position.

How many people do you feel liek you are personally responsible for killing because you haven't given 100% of your disposal income to food relief? Hundreds? Thousands?

This isn't "I could use my money to acquire food for the poor." It's "I'm going to prevent anyone else from selling food, and that will let me charge 100x as much for food."

And yet, if the system wasn't set up this way it's likely that these medicines would never have been developed in the first place.

If we take away investor returns now, why would they ever pursue developing similarly effective drugs in the future?

On the contrary, profit motive and immaterial rights slow down innovation and the spread of new technologies.

This is why states are the main producers of knowledge and funding most of the interesting research.

Good point, maybe researching drugs and treatments shouldn't be done primarily by for-profit companies, and governments should take this on themselves.

Why do we pay doctors? Are they evil if they refuse to go to work for free?

Please explain the relevance of this supposed analogy. How is a doctor withholding their labour restricting the behaviour of anyone else?

People spend their time and resources developing drugs because they know that the patent system provides them an opportunity to earn a return. If drug patents weren’t enforced, GLP-1 would have never been developed. We could rug-pull the particular companies who own GLP-1 patents by removing patent protection after the fact, that would work to improve access to these particular drugs. But then the next lifesaving drugs won’t be developed, because there will be no prospect for a return.

Similar to how doctors save lives and earn a paycheck. We could stop paying doctors, enslave them to work 18 hours 7 days a week so more people get medical care. On top of being obviously evil and wrong, it would also be counterproductive, because then nobody would become a doctor.

Put simply, drugs cost money because money is how we direct resources as a society. There is not a cheat code where we can simply make the drugs free and still expect resources to magically appear and manifest the drugs. The drugs exist because we pay for them.

I share the feeling that it’s awful that people are blocked from access to these lifesaving drugs by money. But simply eliminating patent protection is not a workable solution. It needs to be accompanied by a replacement mechanism to incentivize drug development. For example, government gives out massive prizes to the drug developer but there is no patent protection.

> Allowing them to reap the benefits from their investment for a limited time is just fine.

Or we could just move to a sane economic system where we don't have to beg the rich/reward people for having money

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