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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (130516)	2/8/2010 9:24:28 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541967

Having such a great market for very, very expensive drugs gives them ample motivation to produce them, but very little motivation to produce inexpensive ones. When the drug is on patent they make a lot of money. Once it goes off it tends to face competition and the price goes down a lot. The mass, off patent, OTC market in particular is subject to a lot of competition. Some companies actually fight to keep restrictions on their drugs, because they can make more from them as proscription drugs even generic proscription drugs, than as OTC medicine, where people usually pay out of their own pocket and where for the major drugs there is a lot of competition. With a lot of products you have very high prices for early adopters, and most people wait until the price works its way down before they buy it. The same very expensive new product later becomes a cheap product. This functions somewhat with medicines as well, but its possible that it might be reduced a bit from the combination of third party payers insulating people from the direct costs, and from the fact that patients, and doctors, are less likely to settle for something older and cheaper if its seriously not as good. They don't want to hear "you'll be able to afford this product in 5 to 10 years", when 1 - They are worried about dying without it now, and 2 - In five or ten years there will probably be some new product which also costs a lot, and which will be the go to product while people stop using the older, now not so expensive product.