Did anyone read the article on the front page of the globe yesterday about Genzyme's troubles?
In an unprecedented move for Genzyme Corp., the state’s largest biotechnology company has halted production of two drugs for rare genetic disorders after a virus was discovered in production equipment at its Allston plant. The drugs are used by 8,000 people worldwide and cost about $200,000 per patient annually. While the virus has the ability to taint the drugs, it is not considered harmful to humans, officials said.
OK, did anyone else do the math there? 8,000 patients, at $200,000 each, equals $1.6 Billion per year. Later on in the article, the Globe confirms that figure:
Last year, Cerezyme – Genzyme’s biggest moneymaker – generated $1.24 billion in revenue, said spokesman Bo Piela. Fabrazyme brought in $494 million. Overall, Genzyme last year earned $421.1 million on revenue of $4.6 billion.
Wow, so they managed to spend $4.2 Billion dollars of their revenue last year, I wonder where that went?
Did all that $1.6 Billion come from insurance premiums? That's only two drugs, for a mere 8,000 patients. The total health care spending going to biotech companies must be a hundred times that, at least. Is there any limit to how much we have to pay these companies when they invent a drug treatment? Maybe we should set a limit, if there isn't one.
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p>If you know anyone, and I mean ANYONE in the pharm industry, ask them how expensive the R&D of drugs is. Development and production of drugs for rare and difficult to treat disorders is extremely expensive.
Just put those 8000 people down like horses with broken legs? I don’t know what this drug does, and I also don’t know what the alternatives are. The alternatives might be even more costly, due to the cost of the medicine plus the cost of the other medical procedures necessary because the Genzyme medicine isn’t knocking down other effects of the disease.
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p>Your analysis is cheap — too cheap. Naive. Ignorant. You might be right anyway; the alternative might be to just let ’em die at no cost. I suspect it isn’t that simple.
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p>Don’t forget that medical patents run out… and then we’re at generics which cost far less.
Where does this $200,000 price come from? Why not ten times that, or one tenth of that? I say let’s pay less. Is there a limit to how much you are willing to have us pay?
First off, it’s 8,000 people WORLDWIDE, so you’ll have to account for how many people are not in the US and therefore not on “our” dime, then you have to show how many of those are using private insurance, out of pocket, whatever. Your math is super duper lazy.
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p>Me talkie, you no lissy! Tune in, broseph! Drugs cost LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY to research, develop, and get approved by various governments. Apparently this particular drug is only used by 8,000 people IN THE WORLD. Thus, the cost of the drug treatment is high because they have to pay all the people who worked their asses off to make that drug.
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p>Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that? And then, and then, maybe 15 years down the line you’ll come down with some weird genetic disorder and there will be nothing you can do about it because we paid less (as you decided was the correct choice) and all the people who were formerly making drugs got new jobs because there was no sustainability for the research and production of new drugs.
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p>Want to know a good way to pay less? Make everyone in the country get a treadmill.
By “us”, I mean “people”, not US citizens. There are 6 Billion of us, so we each pay about 30 cents to Genzyme for this one drug. Every starving child, every doting devout grandmother, forks over their share every year, even if they live in an unmapped mountain village and don’t pay taxes. They pay for it. Their extorted contribution is converted predominately to carbon dioxide gasses and plastic, and that doesn’t even count the full costs of water and waste and depletion that we haven’t begun to account for yet.
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p>Are you a Genzyme employee or something? That might be why you didn’t think of simply refusing to pay them as much as they ask for. Apparently, the $160,000 is based on “that’s how much we can get away with”.
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p>If I get sick in 15 years, maybe I won’t survive, maybe I’ll suffer horribly. That’s the way it is, and that’s fine. I don’t think anyone should be allowed to waste the world’s resources under the delusion that we need to change that.
Lol.
Drugs cost LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY to research, develop, and get approved by various governments. Apparently this particular drug is only used by 8,000 people IN THE WORLD. Thus, the cost of the drug treatment is high because they have to pay all the people who worked their asses off to make that drug.
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p>So, you’re saying it’s probably $1.6B per year per drug, and usually the price per patient is lower because there’s far more people that take it? My argument isn’t that there are only 8,000 people that benefit, so it’s not worth it, my argument is that – wow – the biotech industry is soaking up billions of our dollars; is there any limit to how much we are willing to pay for them to develop drugs right now? Do we just pay them whatever they ask for? And, another question that both you and stomv chose to not even acknowledge, let alone try to answer: where does that money go? Salaries? Facilities and equiptment? Energy and raw materials? Animals for testing? Patents and lawyers? It’s our money, we should have more knowledge and control over how they spend it.
For those that missed it, this Globe article talks about the drug in a lot more detail and describes Genzyme’s motivation for their pricing plan: either free or $160K per year.
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p>Note that this drug treats an extremely rare genetic disease without any other cure, not an acquired disease. While you can question whether the price is higher than it needs to be for Genzyme to make a decent profit, we really should not expect such drugs to be cheap.
The profit on this drug is now 90%. If we can nationalize GM, why can’t we nationalize Genzyme, and all the other biotech companies that pursue this ruthless strategy of extortion and murder? Then we can make these drugs they invented at the minimum cost. What’s that? They won’t be able to invent new drugs if we do that? Well, good, because their new drugs are killing people by diverting money from basic preventative health care and wasting tons of energy and causing way more damage in greenhouse gases and nuclear waste than they help. People die, there are always going to be causes of death and people with genetic defects that reduce their lifespans and cause suffering. That’s not going to change by madly putting all our resources into genetic research. Let’s lay off 80% of the biotech workers, they deserve jail time for extortion, but house arrest is a good compromise.