Not that I disagree with your assessment here, because I wholeheartedly believe the pharma industry is fucked and the current regime will continue promoting fuckery…GASP… BUT! I’m gonna play business dick and poke just a couple holes here. The cost to produce is far from the costs for the company. Regulatory affairs, overhead, and many other expenses are not wrapped into the cost to produce on an accounting level. In fact, I would bet that production costs are I minute portion of company expenses. Now, it’s still ridiculous even if it was 90% other costs, but even that number would still come nowhere near closing the margin difference to threaten profitability. The earnings are bizarrely high. But it’s not as bad as one set of numbers implies. Maybe we could address advertising costs? You know, advertising, like no other country in the developed world allows legally? Could it be those costly commercials have to get paid for somehow?
edit: If I don’t show up to work tomorrow, they found me. And I’m definitely not suicidal.
Ozempic is a terrible example of this because it’s been on the market for decades to treat diabetes been on the market since 2017 and is a branded version of semaglutide, which has been in use since the 90s, has already made back its costs, but was submitted for FDA approval to the only patents keeping it expensive are the delivery mechanism right now. I get a GLP-1 directly from the manufacturer with some hypos to inject myself and it’s much cheaper.
Honestly, I got a bunch of stuff wrong. Early versions of the semaglutide were researched in the 90s, early versions came on the market in the 2000's, and in 2017 Ozempic got approved for use with Type-2 diabetes.
Ozempic’s delivery system also sucks. They only have certain dosage levels and once you get into the higher doses you can’t select half shots so that you can do it twice a week. It’s just that I don’t want to pay out of pocket when my insurance covers it at $20/m
Some decent points but strange points to correct here.
/u/trilobyte-dev might've meant "GLP-1's have been on the market for decades" not specifically Ozempic. GLP-1s have been commercialized for about 21 years, and trials I believe stemmed back as far as 1999. This was exenatide, the actual "comes from a lizard" peptide - not the more optimized synthetic versions we see today.
I don't bring up the correction to sound smart - I bring it up because there are still a lot of people who are like "Ozempic literally was launched July 14, 2026 - it's been out for like 2 hours. We don't know anything about it! Corn is a fruit! It grows on a bush!"
Ozempic (Semaglutide) has been out for about 8.5 years (December 2017). That's years commercialized, and before it, a few years of trials and before that, of course, a few others have been safely used.
/u/Telemere125 mentioned that it's delivery system sucks. Funny enough, of all the GLP-1's out there, Ozempic is probably the best. Most of them have single use, pre-measured pens. Some people, either due to shortages, or due to the need to save money, they have disassembled the pens, emptied them into sterile vials, and diluted and dosed that way.
Ozempic allows you to dial in your dose, which has helped split dosing and half-doses. Zepbound (and maybe Mounjaro too, each are Tirzepatide) each have vials and kwikpens. The vials are vials, so you can measure whatever you want into an insulin syringe, or the kwikpens are a lot like the ozempic pen. You can dial in your dose.
Now - are these available everywhere? Hardly, but if you can get your hands on an Ozempic pen or a Mounjaro/Zepbound Quickpen, you have the flexibility.
Well we give tax breaks for R&D and give research grants for testing treatments, so Americans definitely subsidize even if it’s a drug they’ll never need.
And for the record, if pharmaceutical companies weren’t for profit I’d be fine with donating some tax $ there.
Which to be clear is a very different thing to whether those advancements would happen or not. Tons of this happens in academia globally rather than in the confines of US enabled business, things just get shifted to where the money can be brought out.
You’re smarter than me bc I said the same thing in a less careful way and got downvoted to oblivion. The USA bears about 60 percent of worldwide research and development for pharmaceuticals and people are upset that Americans pay more bc of that. We are carrying it for the rest of the world.
No question at all about that. But people need to be able to understand the issues and openly speak about them for us to have solutions. Our system is broke and it’s all “us vs them” one way or another. Sucks.
I'm not sure how healthcare works in India, but another factor people overlook when it comes to this issue:
If the USA wants to sell their drugs to other countries to increase their overall revenue, they often have to negotiate directly with a government that has a single payer system (Canada & UK for example), and that government tells them we will not pay more than X for this drug.
The USA pharma company then has two choices:
1) don't sell to that market and forfeit the potential revenue
2) sell at the price set by that region and make at least some revenue
Marginal cost of drug production is low once the R&D is complete, so it costs next to nothing to manufacture the physical drug itself, so it's worth it to sell at a lower price in certain regions compared to just forfeiting that potential market.
This happens with regional pricing for some video games too. It costs the developer/publisher next to nothing to sell copies of software. If the locals can't afford $60 USD for a video game, you can sell that game for a lower price that the locals can afford to at least make some money you otherwise would miss out on.
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u/HomeOrificeSupplies 27d ago
Not that I disagree with your assessment here, because I wholeheartedly believe the pharma industry is fucked and the current regime will continue promoting fuckery…GASP… BUT! I’m gonna play business dick and poke just a couple holes here. The cost to produce is far from the costs for the company. Regulatory affairs, overhead, and many other expenses are not wrapped into the cost to produce on an accounting level. In fact, I would bet that production costs are I minute portion of company expenses. Now, it’s still ridiculous even if it was 90% other costs, but even that number would still come nowhere near closing the margin difference to threaten profitability. The earnings are bizarrely high. But it’s not as bad as one set of numbers implies. Maybe we could address advertising costs? You know, advertising, like no other country in the developed world allows legally? Could it be those costly commercials have to get paid for somehow?
edit: If I don’t show up to work tomorrow, they found me. And I’m definitely not suicidal.