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Pfizer says it will price Covid treatment Paxlovid at nearly $1,400 for a five-day course, which researchers estimate only costs Pfizer $13 to produce.
That's a 10,000%+ markup. Shameful.
I was given (free) Paxlovid when I finally contracted covid this year. We need laws regulating price increases. If you can’t demonstrate that your costs for a product or service went up, you can’t increase by more than x%. I don’t know how you do this without encouraging higher introductory prices because it’s not a problem that I’ve thought about in depth, but something like this needs to happen with further consideration.
Another thing I’d like to see is robber barons getting prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but that’s not realistic.
Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course … so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
Yeah, that doesn’t really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible.
The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn’t be about profit, it should ge about care.
Drugs aren’t protected by copyright. They’re protected by patents.
In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they’re genuinely useful concepts.
Copyright in particular doesn’t just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven’t already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn’t apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it’s really only affecting the public domain.
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it’s copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There’s no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn’t care about infringing IP, there’s very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
I think you’re thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like “without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?” but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that’s really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium…you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn’t spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I’m not saying Big Pharma isn’t an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.
To be fair, I come from a country where we have free healthcare, free education up to college level (we only pay when taking masters or things like that, after finishing our chosen career.
Our most know public university is pretty top notch if we talk about content and education quality.
And our healthcare is pretty good too, although there is also private healthcare and education. In the education department, at least to my knowledge, there is not really a difference.
The USA is not big. It spends a lot on defense (which usually use to wage innecesary wars or disrupt other governments) and maybe too much in mantaining this horrible two party system you’ve got.
That said, my country’s economy is in very bad shape (Argentina has inflation rates that are sky high).
I was given (free) Paxlovid when I finally contracted covid this year. We need laws regulating price increases. If you can’t demonstrate that your costs for a product or service went up, you can’t increase by more than x%. I don’t know how you do this without encouraging higher introductory prices because it’s not a problem that I’ve thought about in depth, but something like this needs to happen with further consideration.
Another thing I’d like to see is robber barons getting prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but that’s not realistic.
Biden took the first steps towards combating this in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/03/15/hhs-releases-initial-guidance-historic-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program-price-applicability-year-2026.html
Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course … so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
Yeah, that doesn’t really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible. The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn’t be about profit, it should ge about care.
Just get rid of copyright, let the person who can create your product the cheapest make money off it
Or would that be too capitalist for the US
Drugs aren’t protected by copyright. They’re protected by patents.
In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they’re genuinely useful concepts.
Copyright in particular doesn’t just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven’t already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn’t apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it’s really only affecting the public domain.
I’d be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn’t exist for a reason or ever do any good… Isn’t helping actually lead to a solution :)
In a world where you can’t protect your IP, how do you have close sourced?
Military tech is the bigger issue
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it’s copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There’s no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn’t care about infringing IP, there’s very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
Very easily, you compile it.
I think you’re thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like “without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?” but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that’s really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
I was just being lazy and didn’t write patents and trademarks all together
I figured saying copyright would be enough for people to include the whole copyright office
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium…you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
Eliminating capitalism sounds like an easier idea, to be honest.
So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn’t spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I’m not saying Big Pharma isn’t an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.
It’s fair because it helps people
Medicine is a service
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
That would not be true if the government funded things.
I really wish we didn’t let Capitalism control vital to our living services.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things, that would be a nightmare. Government is far too big as it is now.
To be fair, I come from a country where we have free healthcare, free education up to college level (we only pay when taking masters or things like that, after finishing our chosen career. Our most know public university is pretty top notch if we talk about content and education quality. And our healthcare is pretty good too, although there is also private healthcare and education. In the education department, at least to my knowledge, there is not really a difference. The USA is not big. It spends a lot on defense (which usually use to wage innecesary wars or disrupt other governments) and maybe too much in mantaining this horrible two party system you’ve got. That said, my country’s economy is in very bad shape (Argentina has inflation rates that are sky high).
I’ll take competency issues over greed and harm anytime.
I’m sorry to say, but all of three often occur with government as well.
Guess they’d be stuck with relying on research grants and finding cheaper ways to combat diseases
No, they would just keep everything trade secret and we’d have no idea how to replicate the medicine.