So, there's a compromise. The high price of the drug also drives other companies into cancer research as they also want a piece of the pie. That leads to better treatments for everyone. If prices were lower, then there would be less motivation to develop the drugs.
I wholly believe there are hundreds of thousands of researchers who would happily spend their lives in poverty researching cures. The difficulty is that you can't research a cure to anything that's still uncured in a garage with the money you make begging on the street, or manufacture whatever cures you do discover.
The corporations who have billions and billions to spend on it, they need a profit motive to give someone a research budget. It's why they have the billions and billions.
It's not the only system imaginable, but it's the one we got.
I am not saying researchers should live in poverty. However, the Forbes article is peppered with distasteful quotes from CEOs salivating over the billions they stand to make from cancer treatments. Imagine a real person saying "Sure, I could help you with your cancer... if you make me rich" -- they would be called a psychopath. But corporations somehow get a pass.
Why can an Internet store convince its investors to operate at a loss, while a pharmaceutical company cannot tell its investors: "Hey guys, we're working on a freaking cancer cure for humanity, this is way bigger than space travel, so we're not going to be profitable in the near future, a'ight?".
It really depends how the pharmaceutical company is using its quadruple profits. If it is using them for executive compensation, returns to the investors, and gold plated fountains, that's one thing. The corporation could be focused on the short term extraction of as much money from as many dying people as possible.
However, the corporation (and its investors) focusing on long term profits and long term good is not incompatible with charging quadruple the price for its existing drugs. Bringing in more money faster means having more money to reinvest on R&D to research more new cures faster. In which case, double the price again if insurance companies will keep paying it.
At the end of the day those obscene profits are coming from insurance premiums spread over nearly the entire population, making it effectively a private sector tax. If that tax is, in fact, largely going to cancer research, I'm OK with it.
Of course, I'd personally prefer a public sector tax that I knew was going to research and not gold-plated fountains.
Good points. A system with universal private health insurance and pharma companies that reinvest all their profits into research seems equivalent to a system with publicly funded research. (Of course, in private systems there are many uninsured people -- doubling the price of cancer treatments means, to some extent, funding future research from poor, sick people.)
The pat, dismissive response (which you've already gotten several times) is "Hey, cancer research is expensive. Somebody's gotta pay for it."
In a healthy society--at least, a healthy society that is also as wealthy as ours--the solution would be to recognize medical research as a clear public good, and reallocate some of our society's wealth to fully fund both research and production of medicines.
What we have instead is...well, we have a lot of different factors interacting. But just to name a few: we have a government that has convinced us that propping up the military-industrial complex is the most important possible use for billions of dollars, and we have private wealth concentrated in a small number of people who will fight like mother tigers against any attempt to appropriate the smallest amount of their money for the public good.
But that's all complicated and unpleasant to think about. So...hey, cancer research is expensive.
Exactly. We could have a government program to develop nuclear weapons (I wonder if the director of that program made as much as the CEO of Novartis), but we can't have a government program to cure cancer.
There's something wrong with a system where the primary purpose of institutions who fight disease is to make money. Super-valuable research is treated in the same way as making widgets or developing Facebook games -- all that matters is how many dollars it generates for each $100 invested. I find it simultaneously outrageous and ludicrous that the yardstick against which the CEO of Novartis will be judged is how much money the company made, not whether it cured freaking cancer.
I love these sorts of excluded-middle arguments. "Our government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on war toys that are at best unnecessary and at worst a threat to humanity's continued existence. And as if that weren't bad enough, we have a lot of selfish, wealthy asshats who don't want to give even more of their money to the same government."
Yes, it's exactly the same, when you don't trust the government to allocate your tax funds in a sensible manner.
The only diseases governments have helped us with are those addressable by public health programs (and there are quite a few of those, to be fair.) For the rest, no one has ever found a more effective funding mechanism than private industry.
