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Title: The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs
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Manufacturer: University of California Press
List Price: $16.95
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| The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by University of California Press thoroughly researched | | This book is filled with detailed information on drug companies, development and marketing of drugs, federal regulation of drug companies, academic drug research, and some of the interesting characters involved in all of this. It comes across as slightly against big pharma, but not overly so. It may be a touch dry, with a touch more emphasis on the bureaucratic aspects of the drug development process, but definitely worth a read if you're interested in why prescription drugs cost so much in America and where this is all leading. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health. | | The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by University of California Press More innovation not less | I read on this topic with great interest. My family wrestles with drug costs but, at the same time, can attribute being alive and leading productive lives today because of innovative drugs. I have grandparents on medicare, relatives on chronic therapy for everything from high cholesterol to psychological disorders, and others that pay a significant portion of their income to health insurance and/or drugs.
I think the previous reviews of this book sum it up nicely - even those giving it 5 stars seem to agree that the author has an agenda. This is not a thoughtful research style book with provocative insight (is it me or are these books getting harder to find?).
I will not claim to be a policy expert but here are my thoughts.
Americans are capitalists when it comes to everything but their health. It is here that we become socialists. Is that a bad thing? I'm not sure and I grapple with this question myself. When your health is on the line is it fair that people with more means should have access to better healthcare technology? Nobody seems to argue that wealthy people can afford safer cars, live in safer houses and live in safer neighborhoods - that is what success brings right? But when the only cancer drug option costs more than someone can afford it gets sticky. That said - I see a lot of subsidization to help these people both in the government and private sector (charity). When it's your life or your loved one's life on the line it becomes a very personal and understandably complicated issue.
Scientific progress is "community" based and is progressive. A cornerstone of science is that you learn and advance from others - some will turn these innovations to a business that earns a profit and drives further innovation. I agree that pharma/biotech companies don't discover every drug or every drug target but it is they that have the business model to sustain innovation. The profits of this industry, like other industries, drive further innovation that ultimately benefits us.
Drug development is mostly failure. I don't think many people realize this. When I understood how many failures it takes before a drug reaches the market and that the costs of developing drugs keeps going up I can see why drugs costs as much as they do. Simply put - you are not only paying for that new drug you're taking but for the dozens upon dozen of failures that preceded it. The high profit business model is the ONLY WAY to mitigate this risk. Drug companies make huge profit margins but they also invest a greater percentage of their profits back into research and development than any other industry.
Pharma companies have killed their image with all of those "feel good" direct to consumer ads. Shouldn't a doctor prescribe the best drug for each situation based on risk/benefit? And shouldn't these decisions be based on the best facts known at the time and the clinical judgment of the physician? I don't get direct to consumer advertising UNLESS it is purely educational and does not mention or allude to any drug by name. I can understand that when a therapy is available to treat a disease under diagnosed or is emergent that the fastest way to spread the word is through mainstream media.
Even expensive drugs are cheaper than surgery or staying in the hospital (or being institutionalized). It's widely known that for every dollar spent in drug costs you save about 8 dollars in other medical costs.
Bottom line for me is this. I want more innovation. I want my family and friends to get better drugs and avoid the hospital and live better with less pain and suffering. I'm afraid of over regulating the pharma industry simply because I trust the market more than I trust the government. I'm convinced that the pharmaceutical industry has done a hell of lot more to improve human health than it has done to harm it and will continue to do so assuming we don't destroy the business model. Not everyone will be able to afford the latest drugs - but that is where private charity and some government regulation make sense. Don't kill the goose that laid the golden egg because the golden egg is expensive.
| | The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by University of California Press Show me the money! | | From the title, you think that you would walk away from this book disgruntled with big pharma. This was not the case (for me at least). This book chronicles a few big name drugs and the work put in to discovering them. In the end I walked away with my support thrown to the pharmaceutical industry and not the average joe. Book was quite redundant and featured more name dropping than a class roster. Easy to understand for those without a science background but could have been 100pages shorter. | | The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by University of California Press Not coherent | | The subject material, while interesting, is unfortunately presented in a redundant and disorganized fashion. The book reads more like a collection of stories than as a coherent whole. | | The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by University of California Press Ignorance is bliss | Sometimes a writer's bias is so transparent that you don't even need to develop a rebuttal. You simply acknowledge his bias and respect his right to express his extreme, albeit twisted, view of the world.
Goozner is an economist, I majored in economics in both undergrad and grad school, the rest of my education is in chemistry, molecular biology, business and law. He writes about academic research, I have worked at National Laboratories and well known universities. He writes of the pharmaceutical industry, where I spent nearly a decade. And he writes about the biotechnology industry, where I spent another decade. Amazingly, all my life I have spent discovering and developing drugs. So I think I can say I read this book not as a layman, although at times it seemed to be written by one.
I usually enjoy books that are critical of things. They have a tendency to keep us honest and make us all too aware of our faults. But this book, while laudable for its story telling and historical walkabout, did not really get to a point where it stood on firm ground. So in the end, it was so overstated in its extremism, I could not take it seriously. Any good point that could have been made was underminded in its credibility by statements at times so braced by sheer nonsense, I felt bad for the author. I never did take this book seriously.
Goozer is one of those folks that does not believe the constitution is correct to provide protection to inventions through patents. Nor does he seem to believe in capitalism. Rather, he posits that pure open academic research is all that is needed to develop drugs. To him, the Bahy-Dole Act was a license for the pharmaceutical industry to steal from academia.
He would have us believe that all the great drugs developed today really come from academia. If you believe that, then you believe that the internet, as we now know it, including Amazon.com itself, came 100% from academia. Well no Mr. Goozner, Netscape founders and developers of Mosaic did indeed develop their "inventions" at the University of Illinois, but it took good old capatilism and $$ to turn all that into sophisticated products and tools. That is called fundamental research, basic research, being developed into marketibal products. The goal of academic research is not to develop marketable products, it is to further knowledge. The Bayh-Dole Act briged that basic research to the marketplace and last year alone, "academia" made $4 billion from license fees it recieved from those crooks that stole their technology and passed it off as their own after faking an $800 million investment.
The tens of thousands of industry scientists that spend decades developing drugs based on technology licensed from academia should be insulted by a book claiming they had no role in developing the product. I know I am, and I was in academia once.
Lots of things in his book are just plain wrong. To many to list. No need to, because his fundamental thesis is wrong to. I don't question his telling of all the history though, just his conclusions from it.
Lets take the $800 million. He tells us it costs only $100 million and not $800 million to develop a drug. Well, that is not quite what that number means. The $800 million is the cost for the one drug that made it to market, and the 50 that failed in research. That is called an absorbed cost. You see, the vast majority of drugs that are developed never see the pharmacist's shelf. I worked on one such drug that was abandoned after my company spent over $50 million developing it. Now if you are a stockholder, you think you might want a return on your investment. That one successful drug is it.
If we follow Mr. Goozner to the end of his diatribe, we would find that he literally expects the entire drug industry to be a non-profit industry. Well then, since Amazon.com was created from technology that came from academia, it should declare non-profit status and give away all its profits.
What could have been a strong calling to task on the pharmaceutical industry turned out to be nothing more than the fringe, almost socialist, views of an anticapitalist.
Finally, for an economist I was amazed that he managed to oversimplify how the pharmaecutical industry makes development decisions with all his "me too" drug conclusions. If I have to explain that one I am afraid I am going to have to hop on my pro Posner/Pareto/Coase pedistle and preach, which I don't want to do. That takes me back to my first statements. This author is bias against patents, capitalism, and a little uninformed about science (when he tried to be one, he made it obvious why he is not one). But I did like the walk through history, enough to ignore the misleading filters through which me wanted us to view that history. I gave him an extra star for that one. If you are a social engineer or igorant, you might like this book. If you are at all informed, it will leave you like a parody, amused and nothing more.
| | The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs by University of California Press Product Description | Why do life-saving prescription drugs cost so much? Drug companies insist that prices reflect the millions they invest in research and development. In this gripping exposé, Merrill Goozner contends that American taxpayers are in fact footing the bill twice: once by supporting government-funded research and again by paying astronomically high prices for prescription drugs. Goozner demonstrates that almost all the important new drugs of the past quarter-century actually originated from research at taxpayer-funded universities and at the National Institutes of Health. He reports that once the innovative work is over, the pharmaceutical industry often steps in to reap the profit.
Goozner shows how drug innovation is driven by dedicated scientists intent on finding cures for diseases, not by pharmaceutical firms whose bottom line often takes precedence over the advance of medicine. A university biochemist who spent twenty years searching for a single blood protein that later became the best-selling biotech drug in the world, a government employee who discovered the causes for dozens of crippling genetic disorders, and the Department of Energy-funded research that made the Human Genome Project possible--these engrossing accounts illustrate how medical breakthroughs actually take place.
The $800 Million Pill suggests ways that the government's role in testing new medicines could be expanded to eliminate the private sector waste driving up the cost of existing drugs. Pharmaceutical firms should be compelled to refocus their human and financial resources on true medical innovation, Goozner insists. This book is essential reading for everyone concerned about the politically charged topics of drug pricing, Medicare coverage, national health care, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in developing countries. |
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