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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (3051)	12/4/2007 12:12:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Not irrelevant at all. It's mostly pitting one almost identical drug against another. A relatively recent waste of money. Even if that was true, it would still be irrelevant. If the drug companies waste money on marketing, it wouldn't change their incentives in regard to R&D and testing. They spend billions per highly profitable drug that they develop. That investment will be reduced if the profit is reduced, whatever the marketing costs are. To the extent that the marketing cost is very high, than that's even less reason to develop useful new drugs if the profit is limited. Actually I have read that the pipeline for new drugs is terrible right not. Perhaps, and perhaps all the talk about direct or indirect price controls (such as unrestricted imports of price controlled drugs from Canada) has something to do with this. Investment decisions are made based on expected future profit. Political risk effects the expected future return even if the political actions in question haven't been taken. But even if the pipeline is terrible right now, I doubt that 2002 was a better than average year for the post 2000 period. I'm sure it was selected for a reason. And even in 2002 you had 17 totally new drugs, as well as all the perhaps slightly less useful "me toos"

To: Road Walker who wrote (3051)	12/4/2007 12:34:43 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

Not irrelevant at all. The point made was that marketing costs and development costs are independent, which they are. "Marketing costs increasing doesn't make development cost any lower," a true statement, seems to me. You changed the subject. Sure, if competing companies produce similar drugs, marketing costs increase as companies try to focus on their versions. I agree that that's a relatively poor use of money. Differentiated drugs wouldn't require as much marketing because they would stand alone in their niche. Then marketing would not need to be directed towards brand switching but only to let patients with a particular ailment know that there's a drug treatment out there.