re: 79% of Pharma profits come from the USA vs only 4.2% of the worlds population.

Them bribes and payoffs to CONgress makes Corporate billions upon billions in profits.

Why is that?

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And with the fatties come a lot of drugs that pharma sells. Yes, we pay more for drugs. But we also buy a lot more drugs due to how poorly we take care of ourselves.

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The only reason we buy more drugs is because we are affluent. Or have you forgotten how AIDS infected most of Africa is? Not to mention the malaria and other mosquito borne illnesses, the sickle cell disease… the list is long.

This used to be the kind of thing liberals would kick and scream over. Now all of them are going to find a reason to say this is a good thing and they wonder why people have walked away from their party.

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I’m not sure you’re making the point you think you are

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My point is that as a nation we’re fat. Really fricking fat. Don’t read into any further and you’ll agree.

If you want to read any further into it we’re fat because of a large number of people (40% or so) having very poor diets and little personal responsibility, both of which are choices they make. Now with the lazy fatties comes a need for more prescriptions that pharma is more than happy to develop. Prescriptions that Americans pay more for. Doctors that overprescribe meds too. Unscrupulous doctors, coupled with lazy Americans and corporations that are fleecing its US customers. Because we’re not just fat… we’re stupid too. Hopefully that changes.

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It’s not a simple as that. Non US pharma companies use their US R&D as contractors that are reimbursed by the overseas entity. This allows them to take advantage of lower tax rates elsewhere.

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Even more reason that our rates should be cheaper than the rest of the world

We are being over-prescribed at an above cost rate... it's flat out infuriating that this is allowed to occur

Well, in order to reduce the carbon footprint we should no longer subsidize medicine for third world shitholes and decrease the footprints.

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We also have had an ridiculous culture of over-prescribing for decades now and doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, etc using medication for every little thing.

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Its worse than that. Doctors prescribe a drug for an ailment, drug comes with numerous side effects. But dont worry, they have another drug to help with those side effects. But the side effect drug has side effects. So another drug.

rinse and repeat.

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Them bribes and payoffs to CONgress makes Corporate billions upon billions in profits.

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This thread is comedy gold.

I'll say it one more time, then I'm leaving the thread.

With more detail this time:

Over 90% of the applied medical R&D in the world is funded by US companies.

This is because the US protects patents on pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

Other countries do not.

Therefore, we have to pay the going rate for whatever the pharmaceutical companies charge with no competition for the drugs.

Other countries are able to manufacture generic versions immediately without having to wait until the patent expires.

That is why theirs are so much cheaper than ours. There are a few other reasons too, but that's the big one.

But it's not a corporate conspiracy cooked up in a smokey back room with a bunch of guys twisting their mustaches and belting out evil guffaws. This is why populists so frequently end up in the wrong side of issues...because y'all cannot understand that two things can be true at the same time.

People can greedily lean into making money when the opportunity presents itself, but that doesn't mean that the entire circumstance exists only for that purpose.

Remember this, from the top of the post? "Over 90% of the applied medical R&D in the world is funded by US companies."

If the US does like all these other countries and stops protecting the patents, that R&D will come to a grinding halt. There will be no reason to develop new technologies and drugs.

It sucks that we pay the freight for basically everyone else in the world on pharmaceuticals. But our government is doing the correct thing in terms of continuing to incentivize R&D. It's everyone else's government that is not being responsible and just letting us cut the wind for them.

What should happen is that our government should pressure other governments to legally protect the patents. Then the companies could make the revenue they needed by volume. The price would come up some for them, but it would come way down for us.

This board looks more and more like DU every day.