Comment on The way my fuck-ass pharmacist makes up the remaining pills in my bastarding prescription
FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 1 week ago
In Japan, this is the norm. They’ll throw each drug in its own zip lock bag but piecemeal like that is all you’ll get. And people grow really old over here.
I don’t find this mildly infuriating. I think this is a responsible way to deal with a precious resource.
theneverfox@pawb.social 6 days ago
Pills aren’t really precious resources… They cost like cents to make, aside from a few very expensive special ones
The expensive part is all markup
papalonian@lemmy.world 6 days ago
So we can waste the pills if we find a way to keep all the markup safe?
Also the idea that pills costs “cents to make” is pretty flawed. Even if you ignore all of the R&D money that goes in to making newer pills, the sterilized environment they need to be manufactured in is gonna jack the cost up too.
It’s like saying a cup of fresh, ice cold water that you’re getting handed to you in the middle of the desert is only “a few cents worth of water”. Yeah, but the fact that it exists in the middle of the desert for you to consume is what made it a “precious resource”.
theneverfox@pawb.social 6 days ago
The r&d costs come from government grants these days
Yes, a sterile lab is expensive, but like normal business expensive. It’s very achievable to build, drug cartels manage it just fine. Universities and YouTubers have no problem doing it with pretty modest funding
Yes, there’s overhead. But the pills themselves? The materials and production cost is cents. They themselves cost basically nothing
That’s why other countries can afford to sell them for cents - they really are that cheap to make
papalonian@lemmy.world 6 days ago
This bit right here told me that I didn’t need to take this too seriously. An actual medical lab is not comparable to cocaine plants in the Congo.
This is the exact same point from the previous comment. You cannot just look at the material cost of something and say, “see? It only costs cents to make.” Go buy a part that goes in a car engine - it’s just a few cents worth of metal! But, you can’t just take a hunk of metal and magically form it into car parts, there’s a manufacturing process and it’s expensive. That’s part of where the cost comes from. It doesn’t matter if you can make the most expensive pill in the world out of 10 cents of flour if you need a $10 million dollar assembly line to process it and turn it in to what is useful. They aren’t just taking a premade substance and pressing it into pills, there’s numerous chemical reactions and processes taking place.
You start your comment off with saying that R&D is subsidized, and end with saying “other places can sell them for cheap cuz they really are that cheap.” In these other countries, the drug company is not selling the medication directly to the public for pennies, it’s getting subsidized by the government to make it affordable for citizens. Granted the government is not paying US cash prices, but companies simply are not selling direct to consumers for 10x less than other places.
Look, this is coming from someone who fucking hates the predatory medical industry, especially that of the US. I used to work as a very small cog in it. There are absolutely places where prices are disgustingly manipulated and people are taken complete advantage of. Things exist today the way they are because of corporate greed and the continuance of putting profit over people. We can accept all of this as true, and still recognize that producing drugs at a medical grade, with medical levels of consistency and purity, is a difficult, expensive task that requires resources to accomplish. Medication needs to be cheaper (it’s my belief that it should be no direct cost to the user), but momentum is instantly removed from the cause when we use arguments based on a limited grasp of reality.
pishadoot@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
The expensive part is the outrageous costs of R+D that goes into drug discovery and trials, with the majority ending in failure. Not excusing the awful profiteering that goes into pharmaceuticals also, but the end product being cheap to produce isn’t the only cost that companies incur.
theneverfox@pawb.social 5 days ago
Sure, but the R&D is largely subsidized because it’s a common good. Pharmaceutical companies generally take over when it’s already a pretty safe bet… It could fall through during clinical trials, but they don’t pay for the massive R&D they did traditionally. Sometimes they even just buy the patent
There’s overhead, but the vast majority is just profiteering