Great Job Novartis for Screwing Cancer Patients

Yes, teacher. Don't you have some kids to molest?

 

speaking of "mentalities" - have you ever noticed how morons say other people are under the sway of one when they themselves are spouting one themselves? Look at the facts and there is no rational reason for Novartis big pharma in the US to gouge patients in the name of "fair compensation". You are a shot spewing moron my friend.

 

Generic Gleevec in Feb 2016 will solve the issue!

 

Hey Moron are you implying they (san-doze sp) don't undermine branded drugs every opportunity they can regardless the type ?

They'll sue Dr Reddy , Teva etc when legit generics try to intrude on their gouging ever greened drugs.

At least India smacks these bitches down hard & frequently

 

Sandoz is Novartis, which just goes to show you that Novartis will play the game from any angle to capitalize on the market. As per one of the previous posts, its about the greed and win at all cost mentality of the organization. Problem is that they seem to be more off than on in their strategy or product development. Novartis makes up for their mistakes by passing the mistakes of those costs on patients. Capitalism at its best!

 

so you novartis associate, explain "Novartis says it has an extensive assistance program to help those who can't afford the medicines"?

 

It is an assistance program, not a welfare program.

 

when Gleevec has 98 percent of the market share the only way Novartis can increase revenues is to increase pricing of the drug. Its sad that a pill can cost so much since its the only one that works in CML.

Profits over people a Novartis true tag line!

 

That's right! Poor poor Pharma needs to eat too.
And eat well it does!!!!!
All that G&A, T&E, etc. ...oops, I mean research...oops, I mean acquisition is costly.
You think we get our big salaries for nothing???????
HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

 

You think our salaries really measure up? Sandostatin sales for a territory in a given year might be 20-25 million. What if we made 10% commission? Oh wait... What about 1%? Well crap. We don't even come close to that.

 

boohoo

 

Really...Sandostatin has been around for over a quarter of a century with NO competition until this year. Do you really think you are driving performance for Sandostatin? Ask yourself, when was the last time you really had to sell Sandostatin. People have been getting paid for years on this drug and you don't have to do much. Hilarious to see you complaining about your bonus. The drug sells itself- nothing you or the brand team is doing to drive that!

 

The rocketing cost of prescription drugs garners almost daily attention lately. Polls say it’s high on the list of Americans’ health care worries; presidential candidates are calling for sweeping reform; a storm erupts when one company jacks up the price of an HIV drug by 5,000 percent.

And now, research reveals the yawning gap between the price of widely used cancer drugs and their actual cost.

The true cost — what drug makers have to spend to get those pills to your local pharmacy — is made up of the active ingredient and other chemicals, their formulation into a pill, packaging, shipping and a profit margin.

British researchers, in a report to be delivered this weekend at a European cancer conference, say the price of five common cancer drugs is more than 600 times higher than they cost to make.

For instance, the analysis figures the true cost of a year’s supply of Gleevec (generic name imatinib), used to treat certain kinds of leukemia, at $159.

But the yearly price tag for Gleevec is $106,322 in the U.S. and $31,867 in the U.K. A generic version costs about $8,000 in Brazil.

“We were quite surprised just how cheap a lot of these cancer drugs really are,” pharmacologist Andrew Hill of the University of Liverpool said in an interview. “There’s a lot of scope for prices to come down.”

http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2015/09/cancer-drug-cost



Joe,
you got some 'splainin to do.

 

When is the government just going to say "enough!" and decide to take over developing all the drugs we need??? It's seems like such an easy solution. They could get it done for cheap. A hammer or toilet seat costs them $50,000, so imagine how efficient they'd be with drug R&D.

 

Obviously, you and I both know how corporations act, and actions speak louder than words. We also know that government is captured by crony capitalists, hence the price gouging example you cited.

 

Everybody knows the chemical and manufacturing cost of drugs is nominal. It's the up front cost of bringing a new drug to market, the cost of trying to bring a drug to market that doesn't make it and the expected market for a drug during its patent life that determines the cost of a drug.

 

And such costs are amortized over the life of the product. The basic accounting principle of matching expenses to the period in which revenues are earned. But we can't expect everyone to understand this. They see a pill, and even when you explain R&D and sunk costs it goes right over their head.

 

“The pharmaceutical industry-supported Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development claims it costs US$2.56 billion to develop a new drug today; but if you believe that, you probably also believe the earth is flat.

“GlaxoSmithKline’s CEO Andrew Witty himself says the figure of a billion dollars to develop a drug is a myth; this is used by the industry to justify exorbitant prices. We need to ask ourselves, if the CEO of a top pharmaceutical company says it’s a myth that it costs a billion dollars to develop a drug, can we really take this new figure 2.56 billion seriously?

“We know from past studies and the experience of non-profit drug developers that a new drug can be developed for just a fraction of the cost the Tufts report suggests. The cost of developing products is variable, but experience shows that new drugs can be developed for as little as $50 million, or up to $186 million if you take failure into account, which the pharmaceutical industry certainly does—these figures are nowhere near what the industry claims is the cost.

“Today nearly half of R&D spending is paid for by the taxpayer or by philanthropy, and that figure continues to rise as governments do more and more to make up for the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D shortcomings. Not only do taxpayers pay for a very large percentage of industry R&D, they are in fact paying twice because they then get hit with high prices for the drugs themselves.

...The R&D system as we know it is broken and must be fixed.”

—Rohit Malpani, Director Policy and Analysis, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign

 

[In 2009] Barack Obama vowed to 'launch a new effort to conquer a disease that has touched the life of nearly every American'. In so doing, he was intensifying and expanding a 'war on cancer' first declared by Richard Nixon in 1971. For all the billions subsequently spent by the US, British and other governments, progress in that 'war' has been fitful.

The age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is about the same in the 21st century as it was 50 years ago, whereas the death rates for cardiac, cerebro-vascular and infectious diseases have declined by about two-thirds. Since 1977, the overall incidence of cancer in Britain (discounting increases caused by an ageing population) has shot up by 25 per cent.

The 'war on cancer' is as misconceived as the 'war on terror' or the 'war on drugs'...It simplifies a complex and daunting phenomenon - making it ripe for political and financial exploitation.

According to Big Pharma, their corporate model is the only way to advance research. Historically, however, medical advances have largely depended on public institutions (hospitals and universities); the corporate model is relatively recent. It is also a model compromised at its scientific core. The reliance on capitalist incentive for investment, as opposed to investment determined by public need, distorts the field as a whole. Increasingly, research is dictated by marketing. The aim is to produce a profitable drug; R&D priorities are set accordingly. As can be seen in the long-running resistance of Big Pharma to full publication of clinical trials data, the imperatives of competition put a brake on the sharing of information, which is the basis of scientific advance.

Jonas Salk, who discovered the first polio vaccine in the early 1950s, refused to take out a patent for the drug. Explaining his logic, he asked rhetorically, “Could you patent the sun?” He also noted that he had already been paid for his work on the drug through his regular salary as a university-based research scientist. (Not surprisingly, he was placed under surveillance by the FBI.)

 

A mechanism of funding pharmaceutical research which leads to drug prices far in excess of marginal cost is bound to lead to anguish and injustice. But is there a better idea? Perhaps governments should finance the payment of a national licence fee for drugs, with supplies then made available at a price close to production cost.

A rising proportion of medical expenditure is now devoted to prolonging the lives of the very old and the terminally ill. The costs of this are potentially unlimited.

We should pause to ask ourselves the questions raised by the surgeon Atul Gawande in his book, Being Mortal. Perhaps the greatest challenges in modern healthcare are not those of meeting the spiralling cost of advanced medical technologies. They lie in accepting that we are all going to die, and learning to do so with dignity.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/495aba6e-d211-11e4-b66d-00144feab7de.html