OT: Drug Companies Profiterring this is really sad.

You know what they say right? America's Gov't hasn't legalized pot because they can't make money from it, or they won't cure disease for tor the money they get.

With America's bastard President passeda law protecting Drug companies, but heres where it gets interesting

Quote:

---

Genzyme and others, like Orphan Medical (ORPH), benefit from the Orphan Drug Act in the United States and a similar law in Europe that give companies exclusive rights to the drugs for seven and 10 years, respectively.

The high cost of the drugs, usually covered by patients' insurance, is an added benefit. The 3,500 people who take Genzyme's Gaucher treatment, called Cerezyme, pay $170,000 a year. That's $600 million in annual revenue. And, since no cure exists, these patients will likely take the drug for the rest of their lives.

---

anyway heres the link to the full article

http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,57141,00.html

I don't get your point.

Of course there are laws giving drugs companies sole profits from the drugs that they spend their money researching and developing. If there were no laws like that, there would be no incentive for drug companies to come up with new drugs to aid people that are ill. After all this is a capitalistic country. These companies have a responsibility to their share holders and investors, which is to be profitable.

If it costs a drug companies say 100 million to develop a new drug, and that drug will only be purchased by 50,000 people over the course of 7 years. at a minimum the company needs to recover 285$ from each person every year just to recover the cost of developing the drug. This does not even take into consideration making any profit, or getting money to fund the development of other drugs. Also please realize that my numbers are probably really skewed from what the real numbers look like. I'm sure most drugs costs billions of dollars to research and develop. And after seven to ten years, your competitor can just analyze what it is that you made, and then make it themselves at a miniscule fraction of your original cost(generic drugs).

It's a double edged sword. If you let the companies hold the patents longer then the initial cost of the drug will be lower, because they can spread out their cost recovery over more years. But then people complain that they can't get the drug in generic form. If you expire the patents sooner, the initial cost of the drug is higher because the companies have to recover the same amount of money in less time.