Florida State Seminoles

[Jungle Rat]

Pharmucital companies are worse than the people e posted on the Bagley family by far.

[hedge]

See, eCat, the government could put price ceilings on legal heroin, too, low enough so that your car wouldn't get broken into. Win/win...

[Jungle Rat]

You are dumber than I thought and the bar was already very low.

[aTm]

Valeant, which was the main company the Dirty Money episode was about, isn't a pharmaceutical company. They were basically just asset stripping and consolidating marketing and it just happened to be in the pharma sector. You're not a pharma company if you're cutting back and not doing any R&D.

[AlabamAlum]

we're talking about established drugs that had prices low prices for decades and now cost a small fortune like Syprine.

Also, these guys were actually dropping the investment in R&D because buying up existing off patent drugs and then jacking the prices was more profitable

There is no justification for that kind of behavior.

I get the whole you have to let us make up for our R&D. $100K for cancer drugs is not part of that equation.

If a pharmaceutical company wants to stop R&D because margins are tight, then they are slashing their wrists because the other side of the coin is not letting them extend patent copyrights to avoid the creation of generics, allowing importation of drugs from foreign markets and utilizing group buying to reduce prices - all of which are currently protected by the government.

The ROI has to make sense or they stop producing the drugs. If it's off-patent, and there is profit, tons of other companies will produce it. As a patient, you may have to get a generic instead of a brand name, though. If there is no money, and the potential long term financial risks outweigh the profits (or make it negligible), then no one will make it. Again, see what Hillary did to vaccines in the 1990's.

With the on-patent drugs, you have about 10 years to pay for everything (from research, to marketing to education and distribution) and put reserve money aside for potential, future litigation. And keep in mind, not every new drug is a success. The R&D (and other costs) for those have to be absorbed by the financially successful drugs.

That said, there are big pharma companies that take advantage (looking at you Pfizer). Not sure what the answer is. The government mandating lower profit margins? We could do that with every "critical" business from food, to housing, transportation, etc.

[eCat]

there is a definite credibility problem with any big pharma company that raises prices on drugs and tries to claim its altruistic on their part.

A new drug? Ok, maybe, but why invest in developing a drug with a limited market where you feel you have to charge thousands of dollars per dose to make it back?

That's taking advantage of a health care system where insurance is mandated and drug purchases are subsidized. Drug prices wouldn't be where they are without an environment where the insurance acts as a buffer between consumer and manufacturer and then distributes the cost across the entire base of premium holders.

[Saint]

I would argue that a fair percentage of pharmaceuticals are not critical and all that RD is more marketing. I haven't ever taken a pill that was critical to my survival and I'm 52 and we'll beyond my expected life span.

[AlabamAlum]

Altrusim is illusory.

R&D is required on all drugs, whether critical or not. You have to submit a few thousand pages to the FDA just to go to live testing.

When a drug is being developed, they often do not have a good idea of what numbers they will get from it. That comes later, during testing. "Oh, this reduces the aggregation of some types of C-reactive oat cell carcinomas and not much else? Well, release it and try to recoup some of the expenses, past, present, and potential future."

I agree with you, though, that there are a few big pharmas that take advantage of the situation. And drug coverage by most health insurance has gotten so bad that it's no longer a buffer.

The robust reimbursement of pharma is one of the reasons we have so many life-saving drugs. The profits have to be there for this to continue - that is, unless we want to tax payer fund the NIH and make them the nationalized R&D drug developer. They issue a grant for a drug and then patent and release for all to make.

[Saint]

https://longform.org/posts/the-family-t ... re-of-pain

When Big Pharma and Big Government work together

[Saint]

Here's a good story with an interesting take on government's role in R&D. It's not pharma, but energy. Still, you're talking about a critical commodity.


The $70 billion loan program that John MacWilliams had been hired to evaluate was a case in point. It had been authorized by Congress in 2005 to lend money, at very low interest rates, to businesses so that they might develop game-changing energy technologies. The idea that the private sector under-invests in energy innovation is part of the origin story of the D.O.E. “The basic problem is that there is no constituency for an energy program,” James Schlesinger, the first secretary of energy, said as he left the job. “There are many constituencies opposed.” Existing energy businesses—oil companies, utilities—are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for research and development that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app. Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for 20 years ago by the D.O.E. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The Obama administration set a goal in 2009 of getting the cost of utility-scale solar energy down by 2020 from 27 cents a kilowatt-hour to 6 cents. It’s now at seven cents, and competitive with natural gas because of loans made by the D.O.E. “The private sector only steps in once D.O.E. shows it can work,” said Franklin Orr, a Stanford professor of engineering who has just finished a two-year leave of absence, while he oversaw the D.O.E.’s science programs.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07 ... hael-lewis

[sardis]

"The robust reimbursement of pharma is one of the reasons we have so many life-saving drugs."

There is life saving and there is needless life prolonging. The problem with healthcare is the philosophy that everyone deserves the best healthcare and the best drugs. This is also what fuels the pharmaceutical industry that is propped up by government subsidized healthcare, mostly Medicare. We don't need anymore life prolonging drugs because it interferes with quality of life while you are alive due to jacking up the cost of healthcare for basics. The extended life expectancy for everyone is unsustainable financially. The answer is to privatize Medicare with a cap, but that is politically impossible. Seniors, drug companies, hospitals don't like it, but all 3 are sucking off the teet of the rest of us. This is what will bring us down as a nation.

[AlabamAlum]

While that may be true, sardis, and I do not disagree that there is a common sense end to providing hopeless care, the drugs do not usually discriminate between someone with a 1% chance of survival and someone with a 70% chance. The fact that the drug was inappropriately used on the former does not diminish its worth and need for the latter.

Privatization is not necessary. You can do it under the current system. We Americans need to get over the rhetoric of "death panels". We need to be more like the NHS and educate laypeople that on-going procedures and medicines for someone with no real chance of survival is foolish financially and cruel to the patient.

[eCat]

I'm at a little bit of loss at this Cambridge Analytica stuff.

Every mouse click, every keystroke, every search performed is a data point in Facebook. The whole application is based on algorithm's that takes your personal data and creates a narrow viewpoint of the world you see - and facebook profits more from how narrowly that viewpoint becomes. So why is anyone shocked that a company run by millineals harvests that same algorithm to support their needs? - in this case messaging about an election or a voting issue? That's been going on since politics began.

Why is their outrage for fake news on Facebook when everyone here has grown up watching fake news on television. A little girl holding a flower dies by nuclear blast in 1964? A politicians voting record on taxes? abortion, jobs creation....Jefferson accused Adams of being a Hermaphrodite and Adams said Jefferson was the half squaw/ half mulatto , and on a more serious tone, Jefferson used a 3rd party to convince the country - whatever that meant in the late 1700's that Adams wanted to go to war with France.

The point is that no one should be surprised that social media applications in which people willingly provide the most intimate details of their life, their opinions on politics, sex, marriage, religion, major purchases (spending habits) and pretty much anything else is ground zero for targeted campaigning.

And the reason why facebook is reluctant to change it is because targeted advertising is the key to their revenue. Facebook depends on you going out and posting shit about the car you bought, the shoes you wear, the restaurant you ate it, etc. so they can give the same profile to advertisers about you that Cambridge Analytica gave to Russia and Trump. Worse, people willingly participated in online personality "tests" to help populate the profile being created about them.

Politicians and Talking heads demanding that facebook address this major issue are probably demanding it on twitter and asking people to visit their facebook page to voice their opinion.

[hedge]

Well, whatever any of this means, the market took out about $50 billion in the value of Facebook stock yesterday and appears to be another $25 billion coming on the opening this morning. Of course, that could turn around quickly, but damn, that's a lot of shekels...

[Cletus]

I'm at a little bit of loss at this Cambridge Analytica stuff.

Every mouse click, every keystroke, every search performed is a data point in Facebook. The whole application is based on algorithm's that takes your personal data and creates a narrow viewpoint of the world you see - and facebook profits more from how narrowly that viewpoint becomes. So why is anyone shocked that a company run by millineals harvests that same algorithm to support their needs? - in this case messaging about an election or a voting issue? That's been going on since politics began.

Why is their outrage for fake news on Facebook when everyone here has grown up watching fake news on television. A little girl holding a flower dies by nuclear blast in 1964? A politicians voting record on taxes? abortion, jobs creation....Jefferson accused Adams of being a Hermaphrodite and Adams said Jefferson was the half squaw/ half mulatto , and on a more serious tone, Jefferson used a 3rd party to convince the country - whatever that meant in the late 1700's that Adams wanted to go to war with France.

The point is that no one should be surprised that social media applications in which people willingly provide the most intimate details of their life, their opinions on politics, sex, marriage, religion, major purchases (spending habits) and pretty much anything else is ground zero for targeted campaigning.

And the reason why facebook is reluctant to change it is because targeted advertising is the key to their revenue. Facebook depends on you going out and posting shit about the car you bought, the shoes you wear, the restaurant you ate it, etc. so they can give the same profile to advertisers about you that Cambridge Analytica gave to Russia and Trump. Worse, people willingly participated in online personality "tests" to help populate the profile being created about them.

Politicians and Talking heads demanding that facebook address this major issue are probably demanding it on twitter and asking people to visit their facebook page to voice their opinion.

Facebook and their users have an agreement about the kind of data that will be collected, how it will be used, and who can use it. That agreement does not allow for a firm like CA to use the data in the way they did. People are upset because it was used to support Trump which any reasonable person would find appalling but also that Facebook knew about this violation for years and did nothing. But, I think the biggest thing is that it's finally making people realize how much personal information they freely give away. Can't really blame FB for this since the TOS says what they are doing to do but maybe this will compel people to think more about the implications of participating in these social networks and think about how much they value privacy.

[eCat]

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.

“My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” he said.

Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused.

Parakilas, whose job it was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.

“It has been painful watching,” he said. “Because I know that they could have prevented it.”

[eCat]

Facebook and their users have an agreement about the kind of data that will be collected, how it will be used, and who can use it. That agreement does not allow for a firm like CA to use the data in the way they did. People are upset because it was used to support Trump which any reasonable person would find appalling but also that Facebook knew about this violation for years and did nothing. But, I think the biggest thing is that it's finally making people realize how much personal information they freely give away. Can't really blame FB for this since the TOS says what they are doing to do but maybe this will compel people to think more about the implications of participating in these social networks and think about how much they value privacy.

once the data is harvested and in control of a 3rd party, its no longer Facebook data.

Asked what kind of control Facebook had over the data given to outside developers, he replied: “Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.”

Parakilas said he “always assumed there was something of a black market” for Facebook data that had been passed to external developers. However, he said that when he told other executives the company should proactively “audit developers directly and see what’s going on with the data” he was discouraged from the approach.

[eCat]

if anyone hasn't noticed, what we post here is cataloged into Google's system. You can search for direct quotes from here and it will appear in a google search engine. Do a google search for bigredman indiana and see what the first hit is

[Cletus]

Another school shooting today. But, you guys don't care as long as you get to keep your gun hobby.

[DooKSucks]

Privatization is not necessary. You can do it under the current system. We Americans need to get over the rhetoric of "death panels". We need to be more like the NHS and educate laypeople that on-going procedures and medicines for someone with no real chance of survival is foolish financially and cruel to the patient.

Amen. My wife's grandmother is in her mid 90's, and on a good day, she might know who you are and tell one of her around-the-clock nurses that she is about to shit herself. When she was 87, they did open heart surgery. Why? They can't let go and the old woman wanted it. Granted, she was in decent health then and fairly independent, but there was no realization that the lady wouldn't have a quality life past a certain point. Now, she is sitting there in misery. People need to learn to let go and understand that there is a difference between quantity and quality of life, and on top of that, people need to remember that you can't treat everyone. Young people should take priority over older people.