This blog discusses pricing and spending trends, not necessarily profits...which for Medicare/Medicaid are miniscule for insurers and retailers, while mfgs do make a good overall profit.
Latest CMS Data Reveal the Truth About U.S. Drug Spending
The boffins at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently dropped the latest National Health Expenditure (NHE) data, which measures all U.S. spending on healthcare. (Links below.)
As you will see, retail and mail prescription drug spending remain a consistently small share of the $4.5 trillion that we spend on U.S. healthcare.
And contrary to what you might read, drug spending growth was *not* driven by purportedly âskyrocketingâ drug prices. In reality, nearly all drug spending growth occurred due to growth in the number of people treated, prescriptions dispensed, and other nonprice factors.
Tomorrow, weâll be treated to a Senate show trial featuring pharmaceutical company executives. Sadly, pharma industry perma-critics refuse to accept that brand-name drug prices are fallingâor that prescription drug spending is a small and stable portion of overall U.S. healthcare expenditures. Will drug pricing flat earthers (#DPFE) ever acknowledge the data? I ⥠DATA
As always, I encourage you to review the CMS source materials:
my initial coffee thoughts on this: that pharma's business is getting digitized
like everyone else on the planet, they are going to go through some form of this
what will that look like in the future?
not sure, but research, production and distribution are going to get a lot less expensive
probably be as simple as acquiring a product, analyzing and recreating it with similar tools/info
i doubt it will be as dramatic as the record/music industry but their business model will definitely change
regards
The RNA vaccines notwithstanding, must drugs are shelf-stable at room temperature, cheap to make in large quantities, effective in small quantities, work for almost everyone in the world, and market themselves when the need arises; think semiconductors, except that instead of government policies making them cheap as possible, we have policies making them as expensive as possible. I don't see anything disrupting that but a political movement.
Patent monopolies are very inefficient mechanisms for developing drugs and we should be looking to alternatives and not trying to reinforce what to my mind is a very broken system.
my initial coffee thoughts on this: that pharma's business is getting digitized
like everyone else on the planet, they are going to go through some form of this
what will that look like in the future?
not sure, but research, production and distribution are going to get a lot less expensive
probably be as simple as acquiring a product, analyzing and recreating it with similar tools/info
i doubt it will be as dramatic as the record/music industry but their business model will definitely change
BAKER: The idea that we have a national interest, so you’ll often hear people in the U S say: Oh, they’re stealing our intellectual property. And I always go: well, it’s not my intellectual property. We don’t have a national interest in seeing Pfizer being able to charge very high prices for its drugs either in the developing world or in the United States. That’s an interest that Pfizer has. So if you have a lot of stock in Pfizer, you have that interest. If you’re a top executive at Pfizer, you have that interest. It’s not a general interest that we have.
So, the important thing to try to get progressives in the United States in Europe to realize is those drug companies don’t represent us. They represent themselves. And just as people in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, Asia don’t want to pay high drug prices, there’s no reason we should want to either.
Patent monopolies are very inefficient mechanisms for developing drugs and we should be looking to alternatives and not trying to reinforce what to my mind is a very broken system.
