HIV "cure" could make UK first to be rid of virus

[MaggieD]

Still only research tests and the tests on the patient will continue but this looks very positive for all sufferers around the world. (Not to mention profits for sales in treatment)

Great news - now, should the drug be free or sold for profit? (Being from a country with Universal Healthcare I am very pro-free access to critical life saving treatments)

Well, it's not free. So who do you propose pay for it?

 

[Auvergnat]

Then those people wouldn't be buying the drugs to treat their disease.

But they will continue to spread the disease. What I am trying to explain to you is that simply having a cure does not make the disease disappear in two years, it takes decades and a colossal global initiative. See the polio effort for example. And this would be far longer for AIDS since most of people always do not know they are contaminated.

In a short time sure a company could earn billions of dollars before a disease vanishes. But companies also think long term.

Given the choice between 20 billions now and 20 billions over the next twenty years (constant dollars), companies will always choose now because they can then use it to earn 40 billions over 20 years.

Being long-term or short-term is not a quality per se. The proper decision frame is the following one: compare how much your investment will earn you over a timeframe X with how much a baseline 5% a year financial investment would yield over the same timeframe. Then, all things being equal, the sooner you will get this money the better, since you can make it profit faster. Even more so if you have great plans for this money in the near future.

TL; DR: the only reason to choose a long-term investment over a short-term one is if the long-term one will earn you a lot more.

 

[Auvergnat]

SO people who can bare even afford the HIV/AIDs treatments will somehow be able to afford that much of a increase for the cure?

For westerners, the liftime cost of HIV is around 500k$. This means that insurers and govts would be ready to pay, say, 100k$ per patient. Maybe more, the calculations are pretty complex. More than two millions of people in the West have AIDS, so this already amounts to 200 billions, concentrated over the first years.

For Africa, give their GDP and the diseases' prevalence, the economic damages of AIDS are likely easily above 100 billions a year, more on the long-term if you factor in the lost growth. Making AIDS recess at the scale of a continent would be a long-term effort, but I am pretty sure you could get them top pay ten billions a year for as long as your patents would last (twenty years). Those countries do have that money (and many have public healthcare), and western countries and foundations are already spending more than this for AIDS in Africa.

 

[Crovax]

For westerners, the liftime cost of HIV is around 500k$. This means that insurers and govts would be ready to pay, say, 100k$ per patient. Maybe more, the calculations are pretty complex. More than two millions of people in the West have AIDS, so this already amounts to 200 billions, concentrated over the first years.

For Africa, give their GDP and the diseases' prevalence, the economic damages of AIDS are likely easily above 100 billions a year, more on the long-term if you factor in the lost growth. Making AIDS recess at the scale of a continent would be a long-term effort, but I am pretty sure you could get them top pay ten billions a year for as long as your patents would last (twenty years). Those countries do have that money (and many have public healthcare), and western countries and foundations are already spending more than this for AIDS in Africa.

Not to mention that if you had a proven cure, you could have the biggest AIDS fundraiser ever.

 

[Surrealistik]

Free to them, but not to the rest of us. Someone has to produce the medication and pay the doctors and facilities.

Great, so let's charge the UK a ransom in turn for any important medical innovations we come up with via taxpayer dollars: having close allies gouge each other to access their publicly funded medical innovations as opposed to mutually sharing them sounds like an excellent plan.

To preempt you, there's no Tragedy of the Commons/risk of abusive freeloaders at play here: each government allocates a substantial amount of resources to medical research regardless of what it's peers/allies do, and furthermore, there is still substantial benefit to that allocation of resources regardless of the investment made by other countries, particularly if governments delegate and coordinate such research with each other (which is often the case).

 

[zyzygy]

The point is, there is no profit in a cure. Once cured the money stops coming in right? Hence there is no incentive to find a cure.

As for cancer survivability .. funny thing. Before people died, so did the revenue stream. Keeping them alive at what ever cost, means more money! But actually curing people... not really. You are in remission, not cured. Remission means more tests, more doctor visits, more costs...

European Pharma cured my leukemia. It didn't cost much, my socialized medical insurance paid for it. No more visits to the hospital. Doctors are in the business of curing illness.

 

[zyzygy]

Free to them, but not to the rest of us. Someone has to produce the medication and pay the doctors and facilities.

It's not free where I live. Everybody pays into the system.

 

[Infinite Chaos]

Well, it's not free. So who do you propose pay for it?

We have universal healthcare here so it's paid through general taxes and national insurance contributions. Basically everyone contributes to the general health of everyone else and thatmeans we don't leave the weakest or poorest to suffer because they can't afford a particular and expensive treatment.

Point in the UK OP example is the drug is being developed here and the question of raising profit comes to bear.

 

[Lafayette]

(Being from a country with Universal Healthcare I am very pro-free access to critical life saving treatments)

This comment brings up an important point: What would pharmaceutical companies do without the talent that a free tertiary-education allowed the scientists who develop their drugs?

Nada, that's what. Which is why we need publicly-funded state tertiary-education schools. Scientists and doctors who graduate with degrees that cost them more than $100K "think" that their investment cost should pay-off in terms of salaries. Which, ipso fact, makes inventing new products more costly and therefore companies expect a "payback" that covers their costs (and allows for profit).

We Yanks also seem to think that "cost-has-no-limit" in another industry as well - that of defense.

Where the calculation of cost-benefit justification can be warped as well, as when the DoD justifies extravagant development costs due to the "technical complexity" of the products the Armed Services employ. Like, for instance, the blather we get justifying a monstrously costly trillion dollar F-35 program.

And Congress, like a lap-dog, eats it up because Defense Industries put pressure on their representatives to tow-the-line or see "jobs reductions in your constituency". This should, but doesn't, constitute blatantly illegal pressure placed on a politician.

Let's make sure this is the very last Defense Industry "boondoggle", and seek cost-justified development projects in the future. Perhaps also accompanied by a decision to view the world through different lenses? The US has significantly important other socioeconomic problems at present to attend to without knee-jerking reflexively at the altar of Global Defense and thus the Defense Industry!
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[Lafayette]

European Pharma cured my leukemia. It didn't cost much, my socialized medical insurance paid for it. No more visits to the hospital. Doctors are in the business of curing illness.

Health Care is not a "business". That's what we've got all wrong conceptually in the US. In Europe it is a Public Service.

Everything that makes money is a "business" in some lexicons. Defense is a "business" for which one must develop a "Market Strategy". Ditto Health-Care. Ditto Education. Ditto ... just about anything that is a Public Service for which knee-jerking MBA-graduates can create a "Business Plan" at which to genuflect along with Upper Management.

I teach in MBA programs. Clearly lacking in too many of them is a class on "Professional Ethics" ...
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[Lafayette]

It's not free where I live. Everybody pays into the system.

Jonny5 evidently does not understand what constitutes a "Public Service"; like HealthCare, Education, Policing, Firefighting, Defense, Highways, Basic Science, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, the list is long, which is why in Europe we have high-taxation. Because we feel that it is better to feed-the-dog BEFORE it becomes a shark and starts feeding on us!

And badly-run governments with crooked politicians (influenced by private industry) collaborate illegally in that evolution ... !
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[jamesrage]

For westerners, the liftime cost of HIV is around 500k$.This means that insurers and govts would be ready to pay, say, 100k$ per patient. Maybe more, the calculations are pretty complex. More than two millions of people in the West have AIDS, so this already amounts to 200 billions, concentrated over the first years.

For Africa, give their GDP and the diseases' prevalence, the economic damages of AIDS are likely easily above 100 billions a year, more on the long-term if you factor in the lost growth. Making AIDS recess at the scale of a continent would be a long-term effort, but I am pretty sure you could get them top pay ten billions a year for as long as your patents would last (twenty years). Those countries do have that money (and many have public healthcare), and western countries and foundations are already spending more than this for AIDS in Africa.

So pharmaceutical companies would give up 400K over the life time of the HIV/AIDs patient to make only 100K in the short term?

 

[zyzygy]

Health Care is not a "business". That's what we've got all wrong conceptually in the US. In Europe it is a Public Service.

Everything that makes money is a "business" in some lexicons. Defense is a "business" for which one must develop a "Market Strategy". Ditto Health-Care. Ditto Education. Ditto ... just about anything that is a Public Service for which knee-jerking MBA-graduates can create a "Business Plan" at which to genuflect along with Upper Management.

I teach in MBA programs. Clearly lacking in too many of them is a class on "Professional Ethics" ...
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I should have said job instead of business.

 

[zyzygy]

Jonny5 evidently does not understand what constitutes a "Public Service"; like HealthCare, Education, Policing, Firefighting, Defense, Highways, Basic Science, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, the list is long, which is why in Europe we have high-taxation. Because we feel that it is better to feed-the-dog BEFORE it becomes a shark and starts feeding on us!

And badly-run governments with crooked politicians (influenced by private industry) collaborate illegally in that evolution ... !
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I don't mind paying the taxes to make sure that the safety net is there.

 

[Lafayette]

I don't mind paying the taxes to make sure that the safety net is there.

Some safety-nets have larger holes than others ...

 

[Auvergnat]

So pharmaceutical companies would give up 400K over the life time of the HIV/AIDs patient to make only 100K in the short term?

Those are not the same companies, you can thank competition.

This is even truer nowadays because more and more big patents are expiring and those drugs are then produced by cheap Indian manufacturers. Western companies, the ones that lead the R&D investments, desperately need new drugs and patents.

 

[Lafayette]

I should have said job instead of business.

In the US, it's a business.

BigBusiness, run by Insurance Companies.

From WikiPedia, here, an excerpt:

Health care markets and pricing

The US health insurance market is highly concentrated, as leading insurers have carried out over 400 mergers from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s (decade). In 2000, the two largest health insurers (Aetna and UnitedHealth Group) had total membership of 32 million. By 2006 the top two insurers, WellPoint and UnitedHealth, had total membership of 67 million. The two companies together had more than 36% of the national market for commercial health insurance. The AMA has said that it "has long been concerned about the impact of consolidated markets on patient care."

A 2007 AMA study found that in 299 of the 313 markets surveyed, one health plan accounted for at least 30% of the combined health maintenance organization (HMO)/preferred provider organization (PPO) market. In 90% of markets, the largest insurer controls at least 30% of the market, and the largest insurer controls more than 50% of the market in 54% of metropolitan areas. The US Department of Justice has recognized this percentage of market control as conferring substantial monopsony power in the relations between insurer and physicians.

Most provider markets (especially hospitals) are also highly concentrated, - roughly 80%, according to criteria established by the FTC and Department of Justice - so insurers usually have little choice about which providers to include in their networks, and consequently little leverage to control the prices they pay. Large insurers frequently negotiate most-favored nation clauses with providers, agreeing to raise rates significantly while guaranteeing that providers will charge other insurers higher rates.

According to some experts, such as Uwe Reinhardt, Sherry Glied, Megan Laugensen, Michael Porter, and Elizabeth Teisberg, this pricing system is highly inefficient and is a major cause of rising health care costs. Health care costs in the United States vary enormously between plans and geographical regions, even when input costs are fairly similar, and rise very quickly. Health care costs have risen faster than economic growth at least since the 1970s.

Given the bolded sentence in red above, if the DoJ finds the US HC-market unfair, one must wonder why Congress DOES NOTHING to change a market that is not truly competitive and maintains excessive costs to the public at large.

Iow, who's bought who?

Which is why, since the 1950s (when Britain was the first), European health-care has been run by National HealthCare organisations that maintain a cost-cap on provider services (including practitioners and pharmaceutical companies). Which means what?

This - total per-capita HC-costs in the US are about double those in Europe (and for lower life-spans*):


*But life-span is not just a matter of HC-expenditure, and perhaps more so of eating-habits?

 

[Lafayette]

Those are not the same companies, you can thank competition.

This is even truer nowadays because more and more big patents are expiring and those drugs are then produced by cheap Indian manufacturers. Western companies, the ones that lead the R&D investments, desperately need new drugs and patents.

You obviously own their stocks.

The recent finding of a probable HIV curative is likely the last for a good long while that Medical Care needs to cure most serious illnesses.

Moreover:
*From Forbes - America's Broken Health Care System: The Role of Drug, Device Manufacturers
*From WSJ - How Do We Deal With Rising Drug Costs?
*From the Guardian: The real reason drugs cost so much – and why big pharma is so rich

Etc., etc., etc. - ad nauseam ...
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[Auvergnat]

*From Forbes - America's Broken Health Care System: The Role of Drug, Device Manufacturers
*From WSJ - How Do We Deal With Rising Drug Costs?
*From the Guardian: The real reason drugs cost so much – and why big pharma is so rich

Explain to me how anything of that contradicts what I just told.

It does not. But your brain directly went through your most preferred mode: "oh, he is saying that pharmaceutical companies are good while they are bad, here is an opportunity for me to reestablish TRUTH and point more fingers at EVIL and feel good."

Beware, social justice warrior: if you keep waving this finger, one day a dog will bite it.

 

[Lafayette]

Western companies, the ones that lead the R&D investments, desperately need new drugs and patents.

And what am I supposed to understand from the above comment?

Desperately need new patented drugs? Only if you own pharmaceutical stocks!

Come off you High Horse ...
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[MaggieD]

We have universal healthcare here so it's paid through general taxes and national insurance contributions. Basically everyone contributes to the general health of everyone else and thatmeans we don't leave the weakest or poorest to suffer because they can't afford a particular and expensive treatment.

Point in the UK OP example is the drug is being developed here and the question of raising profit comes to bear.

I have a friend who is now an American citizen. His family lives in the U.K. His older brother waited four months for a cat scan. He never made the wait. He had pancreatic cancer. Kevin, my friend, was, of course, heartbroken. Before that happens, he was quite a fan of universal healthcare and held it up as a model for us here. He doesn't do that anymore.

This subjective example is just that. But it gives me pause as I see the US moving closer to that model. That kind of wait here in the US would, of course never happen. Order a CAT scan today? You're being zapped by Thursday or even sooner.

 

[jonny5]

It's not free where I live. Everybody pays into the system.

Even the homeless? The unemployed? The poor? Where is this?

 

[jonny5]

Jonny5 evidently does not understand what constitutes a "Public Service"; like HealthCare, Education, Policing, Firefighting, Defense, Highways, Basic Science, etc., etc., etc.

Yes, the list is long, which is why in Europe we have high-taxation. Because we feel that it is better to feed-the-dog BEFORE it becomes a shark and starts feeding on us!

And badly-run governments with crooked politicians (influenced by private industry) collaborate illegally in that evolution ... !
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Im right here. If you have a ad hominem, then say it to my face.

 

[Lafayette]

I have a friend who is now an American citizen. His family lives in the U.K. His older brother waited four months for a cat scan. He never made the wait. He had pancreatic cancer. Kevin, my friend, was, of course, heartbroken. Before that happens, he was quite a fan of universal healthcare and held it up as a model for us here. He doesn't do that anymore.

This subjective example is just that. But it gives me pause as I see the US moving closer to that model. That kind of wait here in the US would, of course never happen. Order a CAT scan today? You're being zapped by Thursday or even sooner.

Though your example astonished me, I fear it is "rather normal". And the Brits know it. See from The Independent newspaper here.

I suggest nonetheless that that problem is particular to the UK. Some Brits even come over to France in Lille. And I know damn few Brits living in France who go back to the UK for the Health Care.

Your friend would never have waited that much for a cat-scan here in France. A week and half at the most. Moreover, far more important is the annual check-up at the doctor because rushing off to ER in the US when "something happens" - whilst it makes for a good TV-program - usually is far too late in the more serious illnesses.

And until ObamaCare, fully 16% of the American population had no HealthCare insurance whatsoever.

What happened in the UK is indeed unfortunate, because the concept of a National HealthCare System was born in that country back in 1948. Which gave impetus within the original Common Market to exacting that membership required establishing an NHS. Zero percent of EU citizens have no healthcare insurance whatsoever as indicated here. And by that is meant "basic health care". If you want a single-bed room, then you pay extra. If you want dental-coverage as well, you pay extra.

HealthCare and Tertiary Education are two of the "freebies" that were originated in the EU - an agglomerate of "pinko/socialist runners with the commie dogs" that saw-the-light a long, long time ago.

The US is still in the dark regarding HealthCare even if it has (finally) ObamaCare - which is not even what Hillary had proposed during her husband's administration. There is just too much money to be made for the Insurance Companies (and the practitioners) to want to give it up readily ...
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[zyzygy]

Even the homeless? The unemployed? The poor? Where is this?

Belgium. Some of the tax on unemployment benefit goes to the health care system. We don't have a huge homelessness problem.

"The Belgian healthcare system is one of the best in Europe but you need to have state and/or private health insurance to use it."

"As part of the social security enrolment process, all employees and self-employed must register and start making contributions to a health insurance fund (mutuelle / ziekenfonds). Contributions are 7.35 percent of your gross salary (3.55 percent deducted at source; 3.8 percent paid by your employer). Self-employed people pay the full 7.35 percent through social security payments. You and any dependents are covered."

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