Greed? That’s a funny name for “trying to make one’s investment back.”

Yeah, from FacialBook as usual, the Book of a Million Lies:

Wrong.

Greed is not the problem.  Government over-regulation and FDA slow-rolling of drug approval is the problem.  Drug companies pour billions of dollars annually into drug development, most of which is “wasted” when new ideas for drugs don’t pan out, usually after years of expensive trials.  I’ve read that the success rate for drug development is one drug in ten, so for every billion-dollar development program that succeeds, there are nine billion-dollar development programs that fail.  If that rate holds, for every new drug a company develops through FDA approval, they have a $10 billion investment that has to be accounted for and and recovered.  Not much profit there!

Yet people wonder why new drugs cost so much, and agitators like Sachin Patel claim it’s because of greed.  Is it really greedy to want a return on your ten billion dollar investment?  Does Dr. Patel like having new drugs and therapies, or would he prefer to go back to the old days when aspirin and chalk pills was about all a doctor could prescribe?

I’ll agree in a heartbeat that there are companies like Mylan who ought to be ashamed of themselves (and be run of business) for what they charge for basic drugs just because they have a fancy proprietary delivery system.  But by and large, drugs are expensive to buy because they are expensive to develop, and drug companies naturally want to make their money back.

These RealFarmacy people are a real danger to the rest of the world.  Liars, cheats, and swindlers all, they are nothing more than modern Luddites wishing the rest of us back into a medieval world where we all drop dead in our 40’s from preventable disease, or starve to death because there isn’t enough food.  They are the logical heirs of Paul Ehrlich and his ilk.