> Pyrimethamine has been available since 1953.[20] In 2010, GlaxoSmithKline sold the marketing rights for Daraprim to CorePharma.
If Wikipedia is correct, that drug was long ago out of patent doghouse. I don’t know why USA (government, nonprofit, bill gates I don’t care who) doesn’t just make generics. Ditto insulin, that is another glaring example of that insanity.
You could argue (very reasonably) that one of key requirements for free market is a freedom not to buy. That is a potential choice, but few billion of years of evolution says a very bad choice. Thus rather special status of healthcare in pretty much every country.
Back to the issue of capitalist drug research: maybe it’s just me, but most of the new drugs seem to come from USA. Other countries with less insane healthcare (not even sure if care is the correct word in USA context) system (e.g. NHS in UK) don’t seem to produce new drugs.
Ergo, this bad system seems less bad than others, at least as producing new stuff goes.
> maybe it’s just me, but most of the new drugs seem to come from USA.
It's just you.
What we see from the US is re-patenting. Citalopram gets a minor change and becomes escitalopram, it gets a new patent and some bullshit sales pitch to make doctors switch from a cheap generic to a more expensive branded med. Or ketamine infusion becomes eskatamine nasal spray - moved from a generic and tricky to administer med to a branded and easy to administer med (and, it turns out, much less effective).
The other thing the US does is "Me too" drugs - someone develops an SSRI and the US is then able to spin up 8 different versions of SSRIs that are different enough to get their own names and patents.
Most of the funding in the US doesn't come from big pharmaceutical companies, but is government funding.
For the new meds that are developed in the US the funding normally comes from Government (NIHR) funding, and not direct from pharmaceutical companies.
It's also difficult to work out what to measure: do we look at GERD (gross expenditure on research and development) or do we look at GDP too? DO we look at the quantity of new meds, or the impact on quality of life or years of life lost to disability? Do we focus on meds aimed at diseases that affect wealthy countries (diabetes, breast cancer, etc) or on disease that mostly affects poorer countries? Because three meds that have moderate impact for a small population are "less" than one med that has a good strong impact on a large population.
If Wikipedia is correct, that drug was long ago out of patent doghouse. I don’t know why USA (government, nonprofit, bill gates I don’t care who) doesn’t just make generics. Ditto insulin, that is another glaring example of that insanity.
You could argue (very reasonably) that one of key requirements for free market is a freedom not to buy. That is a potential choice, but few billion of years of evolution says a very bad choice. Thus rather special status of healthcare in pretty much every country.
Back to the issue of capitalist drug research: maybe it’s just me, but most of the new drugs seem to come from USA. Other countries with less insane healthcare (not even sure if care is the correct word in USA context) system (e.g. NHS in UK) don’t seem to produce new drugs.
Ergo, this bad system seems less bad than others, at least as producing new stuff goes.