'We get Viagra. They get malaria.' - Acton Institute PowerBlog
a good explanation of the straits my business is in...selling pills is like selling airline seats...
'We get Viagra. They get malaria.' - Acton Institute PowerBlog: "Huber, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, summarizes in brief the anti-drug company argument, and then goes on to examine what truth there is in such claims. He says of the difference between creating and administering drugs, “Getting drug policy right depends mainly on getting that difference straight—the difference, that is, between ministering to the sick and making medicines—and grasping its implications from the start. Big Pharma’s critics do not even try.”
He goes on:
Pricing is indeed the key. Whether the first pill typically costs $100 million or $1 billion to develop, replicating it costs less—a thousand times less, or perhaps a million times less. This slope—precipice, really—is far steeper than most of the other hills and valleys of economic life. It complicates things immeasurably. It also largely explains the gulf between the industry’s perception of reality and that of the critics.
Huber gives some explanation of the function of the price mechanism in pharmaceutical markets, and says, “Economists have established—as rigorously as things ever get established by the dismal science—that there is no efficient price, no ‘right’ price. Any scheme is, from one perspective or another, inefficient, unreasonable, or worse.” He argues that the high prices for boutique drugs like Viagra in the developed world help fund the provision of desperately needed drugs in the developing world. This is the situation created by so-called “price discrimination”.
The situation he says, is similar to that of airline travel: “Business travelers get soaked, college students fly almost for free, and the jumble of prices in between drives most people nuts. But the planes are packed full, and that drives the average price of a ticket way down. The rich fly, and the much less rich fly, too.” There is, I would think, a similar model at play in the work of p"
'We get Viagra. They get malaria.' - Acton Institute PowerBlog: "Huber, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, summarizes in brief the anti-drug company argument, and then goes on to examine what truth there is in such claims. He says of the difference between creating and administering drugs, “Getting drug policy right depends mainly on getting that difference straight—the difference, that is, between ministering to the sick and making medicines—and grasping its implications from the start. Big Pharma’s critics do not even try.”
He goes on:
Pricing is indeed the key. Whether the first pill typically costs $100 million or $1 billion to develop, replicating it costs less—a thousand times less, or perhaps a million times less. This slope—precipice, really—is far steeper than most of the other hills and valleys of economic life. It complicates things immeasurably. It also largely explains the gulf between the industry’s perception of reality and that of the critics.
Huber gives some explanation of the function of the price mechanism in pharmaceutical markets, and says, “Economists have established—as rigorously as things ever get established by the dismal science—that there is no efficient price, no ‘right’ price. Any scheme is, from one perspective or another, inefficient, unreasonable, or worse.” He argues that the high prices for boutique drugs like Viagra in the developed world help fund the provision of desperately needed drugs in the developing world. This is the situation created by so-called “price discrimination”.
The situation he says, is similar to that of airline travel: “Business travelers get soaked, college students fly almost for free, and the jumble of prices in between drives most people nuts. But the planes are packed full, and that drives the average price of a ticket way down. The rich fly, and the much less rich fly, too.” There is, I would think, a similar model at play in the work of p"
Comments