Just don’t take the damn Vax. We now know that people who never got vaxed have better immunity than those who did. Studies prove it
So no point getting this crap just to make Pfizer rich
ahh now it makes more sense why governments let it turn into an endemic virus
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
It does make companies more willing to invest more into drug research , which is a good thing.
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
Covid treatment was publicly funded. This is a case of public funding going to research and private companies profiting from it.
Everyone should be outraged from the situation. This cheap treatment is being denied to the majority of the world’s population because of patients, and so covid has more opportunities to mutate and make everyone less safe.
Isn’t it just this expensive because the government can’t negotiate prices? So the insurances will pay a normal price but when the government is paying it’ll cost more
No, it’s expensive because the value it provides.
They’re positioning it based on the length of hospital stay it prevents. In that perspective, this is an absolute bargain. For the most part, they’re selling insurance that $1.4k is far cheaper than even one additional night in the hospital. Insurance is willing to pay because it saves them loads of money. For uninsured and underinsured, it sounds like they’re basically not charging.
Only point I’d add is drugs cost more than they are to produce because of R&D costs, which must be recuperated. If costs are high, and volume is low, it means larger markup over the cost to manufacture.
The R&D costs were largely already paid by tax-payer funded research grants and, in this case, additional emergency funding from governments. This is especially the case in the US, where the government is also legally required to hand over patents for government developed drugs to private companies that did none of the work.
That’s Medicare that you’re thinking of, and they can now negotiate prices. The big one is EpiPen-type products.
