Healthcare

Snowle Gunnar Solskjær said:
Such a ridiculous country

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-48231712
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There'd be a god damn revolution in Norway if someone tried anything like that. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though. Over the last few years I've seen several events over at Reddit where American users are asked to donate office supplies to teachers. I'm a teacher, but I wouldn't be one for long if I had to pay for my own office supplies, let alone pay for my own substitute teacher if I get cancer!
 
Stories like this:

Sweeping lawsuit accuses top generic drug companies, executives of fixing prices
More than 40 states say the biggest drug makers engaged in "industry-wide conspiracy" to fix prices of generic drugs
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sweepi...tives-of-fixing-prices-60-minutes-2019-05-12/

"William Tong: It's an industry-wide conspiracy. And I think it answers one of the biggest questions all of us are asking, which is why are prescription drugs so expensive? And I think we know why now. Because the prices of generic drugs are fixed. And there's a widespread conspiracy to rig the market.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong says his office found evidence of price fixing by dozens of generic drug industry sales directors, marketers, CEOs dating back to 2006./"
 
utdalltheway said:
Was just looking at my weekly paycheck and noticed that my gross/net looked a little low. It turns out I'm paying 37% of my gross salary in deductions.

None of those deductions are for a pension, or dental care - just regular deductions such as federal tax, state tax, soc security, medicare (that's a fcukin laugh!)....

So, a question: how does that compare to folks in Europe/Canada/Oz on a % basis? You get subsidized (or free) university, almost free healthcare, etc?
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Dane here. Just shy of 40% in tax on a yearly salary up to a bit less than 75k if I remember correctly. We don't have tuition fees and students over 18 get paid 800-odd dollars per month to study, unless they earn too much on the side through a part time job. Healthcare in general is free, medicine gets cheaper the more you need it, I paid about $2 for my last 60 doses of some asthma medicine.
 
Eboue said:


What's the point in saving lives if you cant make money doing it? Capitialism is a disease
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Researchers in the company’s division of inflammation and immunology urged Pfizer to conduct a clinical trial on thousands of patients, which they estimated would cost $80 million, to see if the signal contained in the data was real, according to an internal company document obtained by The Washington Post.

“Enbrel could potentially safely prevent, treat and slow progression of Alzheimer’s disease,’’ said the document, a PowerPoint slide show that was prepared for review by an internal Pfizer committee in February 2018.
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Imagine having that job. I'd want to kill myself.
 
Eboue said:


What's the point in saving lives if you cant make money doing it? Capitialism is a disease
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Hardly. Pfizer chose not to spend $80m over four years running clinical trials to test the efficacy of a drug to treat Alzheimers that can't even cross the blood brain barrier. Which has got feck all to do with capitalism and a lot to do with common sense.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Hardly. Pfizer chose not to spend $80m over four years running clinical trials to test the efficacy of a drug to treat Alzheimers that can't even cross the blood brain barrier. Which has got feck all to do with capitalism and a lot to do with common sense.
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You seem to have reached the end of the article, where they discuss peripheral inflammation, very quickly.
Do you think the guys working on drug development are all rubes?
 
@Pogue Mahone
I'd also add that even if it doesn't work directly, publishing their statistical findings could inspire a new direction of work among Alzheimers' researchers outside the company.
 
berbatrick said:
You seem to have reached the end of the article, where they discuss peripheral inflammation, very quickly.
Do you think the guys working on drug development are all rubes?
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I've read about this already. The peripheral inflammation theory is a massive leap of faith. The whole thing is based on observational data from an insurance database analysis. Which is also sketchy as feck.

Capitalism aside, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of any state-funded academic institution throwing that sort of money at such a tenuous hypothesis. As you well know. So why would we expect Pfizer to be even more reckless with their cash?
 
berbatrick said:
@Pogue Mahone
I'd also add that even if it doesn't work directly, publishing their statistical findings could inspire a new direction of work among Alzheimers' researchers outside the company.
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Yes. They should 100% have published their findings. That's a bug bear of mine. Transparency is vital and it boils my piss when research gets buried, no matter the reason.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Hardly. Pfizer chose not to spend $80m over four years running clinical trials to test the efficacy of a drug to treat Alzheimers that can't even cross the blood brain barrier. Which has got feck all to do with capitalism and a lot to do with common sense.
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They didnt even bother to let the public know about this because it wouldnt be profitable for them.
 
Eboue said:
They didnt even bother to let the public know about this because it wouldnt be profitable for them.
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Nah, that's crap. Even this (obviously biased) article makes it clear that they did share the data externally.

Pfizer did share the data privately with at least one prominent scientist, but outside researchers contacted by The Post believe Pfizer also should at least have published its data, making the findings broadly available to researchers.
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I agree they should have published it. Pharma companies have a history of being a bit crap at publishing negative trials or data from studies that they think are methodologically flawed. Of course, part of the problem is the reluctance of scientific journals to publish negative or flawed research. Open source publishing is improving this and pharma companies are getting better at making sure all their research gets shared externally. Some are better at this than others.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I've read about this already. The peripheral inflammation theory is a massive leap of faith. The whole thing is based on observational data from an insurance database analysis. Which is also sketchy as feck. Capitalism aside, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of any state-funded academic institution throwing that much money at such a tenuous hypothesis. As you well know.
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I'm in basic science where the sums involved and the consequences are much much smaller. I can confidently say that if there was any hint of something like this in data I had, me or whoever took over my project would be asked to look at it in a few different ways, and tackle it with the resources we do have (think of a possible mechanism and try to test that, maybe a side project collaborating with another lab). And we'd probably publish too, either standalone or as part of whatever data it originally came from.
It would be slow and wouldn't say much about its use as a medicine, but it would be at a fraction of the price and would be released.
 
berbatrick said:
I'm in basic science where the sums involved and the consequences are much much smaller. I can confidently say that if there was any hint of something like this in data I had, me or whoever took over my project would be asked to look at it in a few different ways, and tackle it with the resources we do have (think of a possible mechanism and try to test that, maybe a side project collaborating with another lab). And we'd probably publish too, either standalone or as part of whatever data it originally came from.
It would be slow and wouldn't say much about its use as a medicine, but it would be at a fraction of the price and would be released.
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Well, exactly. Their priority is research that helps develop medicines. They have finite resources (even though those resources are bigger than in academia) and will prioritise their spending accordingly.

This whole thing is a nothing story. You read them a lot these days. Papers like the WP deluge big pharma with FoI requests, then desperately spin anything even vaguely interesting into an evil capitalist conspiracy.

Lack of transparency in clinical research is a real issue (even though it’s getting better) but this is a shitty example of it. You can find much better examples of profit-driven research denying patients potential novel treatments in tropical medicine or antibiotics.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Well, exactly. Their priority is research that helps develop medicines. They have finite resources (even though those resources are bigger than in academia) and will prioritise their spending accordingly.

This whole thing is a nothing story. You read them a lot these days. Papers like the WP deluge big pharma with FoI requests, then desperately spin anything even vaguely interesting into an evil capitalist conspiracy.

Lack of transparency in clinical research is a real issue (even though it’s getting better) but this is a shitty example of it.
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No, anything my lab did would have no bearing on medicines because we simply cannot investigate that, nor can our collaborators. If Pfizer wants, they can (their profit alone, last quarter, was 150 times the cost of this study). My lab is literally 6 orders of magnitude smaller than Pfizer.
 
berbatrick said:
No, anything my lab did would have no bearing on medicines because we simply cannot investigate that, nor can our collaborators. If Pfizer wants, they can (their profit alone, last quarter, was 150 times the cost of this study). My lab is literally 6 orders of magnitude smaller than Pfizer.
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So what? $80m is $80m. It’s a big sum of money which they’re not going to invest in research that - in their well informed opinion - has slim to no chance of a positive outcome.

As an aside, pharma companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars every years funding the sort of small, exploratory research projects at academic institutions that you just described. Academia would be screwed without the money provided by evil capitalist companies. What this article is about is an internal decision whether or not to divert a shitload of internal resources into developing a drug to treat a condition they were fairly certain would be a dead end.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
So what? $80m is $80m. It’s a big sum of money which they’re not going to invest in research that - in their well informed opinion - has slim to no chance of a positive outcome.
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by that do you mean profitable outcome for shareholders?
 
oneniltothearsenal said:
by that do you mean profitable outcome for shareholders?
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I mean an outcome that justifies the investment.

If anyone has an idea how to generate the sort of money needed to do research on that scale where it doesn’t matter what the outcome is then I’m all ears. Judging by the shitty and wasteful way the government invests money in anything to do with healthcare I’d be wary about giving them that sort of responsibility.
 
Eboue said:
You taught me that you just say things that arent true. The Washington Post as some sort of anti-capitaist muckraking institution is laughable.
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You don’t think newspapers have agendas? Of course they do. Their priority is selling newspapers/generating clicks, so they’re desperate to generate stories that will appeal to their demographic. Which is left-leaning. Or do you think the WP is immune to the effects of capitalism you keep banging on about?

As it happens, I like their agenda. It’s important that at least some big newspapers in the US are left-leaning. They publish a lot of good stuff. The article you shared is silly though. Completely insubstantial.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
You don’t think newspapers have agendas? Of course they do. Their priority is selling newspapers/generating clicks, so they’re desperate to generate stories that will appeal to their demographic. Which is left-leaning. Or do you think the WP is immune to the effects of capitalism you keep banging on about?

As it happens, I like their agenda. It’s important that at least some big newspapers in the US are left-leaning. They publish a lot of good stuff. The article you shared is silly though. Completely insubstantial.
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The Washington post isnt left leaning, more centrist. Even more though, every single major paper or even regional paper is pro-capitalist. It's not even debatable. The Washington post is owned by Jeff Bezos and yet you think it's got an anti-capitalist agenda. I dont even know what to tell you.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
I mean an outcome that justifies the investment.

If anyone has an idea how to generate the sort of money needed to do research on that scale where it doesn’t matter what the outcome is then I’m all ears. Judging by the shitty and wasteful way the government invests money in anything to do with healthcare I’d be wary about giving them that sort of responsibility.
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Whats the criteria for an "outcome that justifies investment"?

Also privatized healthcare is far more wasteful than government at least in the US. First all the regulations and opaque and variable pricing resulting from legislation for profit companies and big pharma wanted installed to increase profits.
Then any profit itself in healthcare is waste. Pfizer banking 13 billion in profit in a single quarter is 13 billion wasted.

Commodifying health care is inherently wasteful.
 
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