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To: Road Walker who wrote (183439)	2/6/2006 5:34:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

as the same drugs are much less expensive in virtually any country in the world. That fact is entirely irrelevant to the point. Now if you where arguing something like "yes the European governments are controlling the price and intervene heavily in the market, but its worth it because the drugs cost less", then the cost of drugs would be extremely relevant but that isn't what you argued. Laws making the government a monopsony buyer are not free market operations. Maybe you can show that they make things better for most people in a million different ways. If you think you can than fine, but even if that is true it doesn't make the laws market operations nor does it make the markets under such laws free markets. As a result we don't play in the REAL market, which is the world market. There isn't a real world market. There are subsidized and heavily regulated, often to the point of being government controlled national markets. Buyers and sellers are not negotiating freely and determining prices. Governments are limiting prices. The US market is also heavily regulated but it at least has much less regulation on prices, and no monopsony buyer. Tim

To: Road Walker who wrote (183439)	2/8/2006 12:58:51 AM
From: Dinesh	Respond to of 186894

as the same drugs are much less expensive in virtually any country in the world. What makes you think the same product is sold elsewhere? When you buy a product in the US, the physical attributes are but just one dimension. People nearly always overlook the other, service-oriented dimensions of the product, even though in the US the services constitute nearly 2/3 of the economy. Drugs sold elsewhere do not come with the same level of assurances of effectiveness, disclosures and liability as they do in the US. If you were a consumer of Medicine XYZ in some poor African country (or, even Canada), suffered a side effect, and thought that it was because of this medicine - tough luck! But in the US, it's a very different matter. As a consequence, the costs in the US go up. Quantifying this difference and its role in the price differential can be difficult. But the ROIC of a big pharma is not anywhere as obscene as you make it sound like. To give another example (from a different field) - think of the Pentium floating point fiasco. Would it have been as bad had the _entire_ episode happened in a third-world country? Put still differently, if 80% of the average software is about exception handling, lo! be rid of all error handling and project will cost less. regards -d