Jumping Off a Cliff

Another dump-in essay.  Over at Seeking Alpha (a site which, 99.44% of the time, only says Good Things about shares) is an article on Pharma's patent cliff.  Naturally, I was moved to comment, and it's somewhat longer than what I've been purposely writing these days, so here it is.


Well, if the science has been exhausted (in its current form), then the cost of health care (in its current state of life saving) should decline. Statins do work; although I recall reading recently that LDL/HDL levels may not be such a great marker for OS (that's from memory; I could have mis-read). If the for-profit model collapses, we could well see a return to a semblance of what we had decades ago: Federal funding of research and the release of compounds into the public domain.

If one looks at life expectancy for the US vs. any country that isn't third world, Big Pharma hasn't done such a bang up job. Further, all the bullshit from the Right Wingnuts that Social Security was set up to kick in at the age of life expectancy (not true, but I'll let that pass), and "we're living so much longer now, social security is doomed".

Big Pharma, with Federal complicity I'll admit, took advantage of the "War on Cancer", which was initiated to find a "cure". In fact, what we've gotten is a few extra months of life at end-of-life for staggering amounts of cash; most of which *does not* go to R&D, but rather to management and shareholders. All of these ad hoc potions haven't gotten us any closer to a "cure". Made a few folks nice and rich, but not so much for the rest of us.

The same could be said for diabetes; [Mannkind] is getting hammered, yet on the data has what could be viewed as a cure. One might wonder whose ox is being saved from a goring.

Well, demographers know better. The increase in life expectancy *at birth* rose about two decades over the 20th century. It rose by about *2 years* at age 65 over the same period. Read that again. What it means is that more folks were around to fund social security (designed from the start as a current account program), far in excess of their extra few months at the back end.