Quote: (05-23-2014 05:09 PM)SheWantsTheD Wrote:
So? Look, people do things for a reward. No one spends years and billions out of the goodness of their heart.
You take away the incentive - money - and you're left with everyone doing the bare minimum and the people left with half assed care.
Quit throwing up false dichotomies and straw men. Nobody is saying they don't believe in profit or that innovators shouldn't get wealthy from their hard work. What we question is a matter of degree. It's been pointed out to you that more overhead is spend on marketing than on R&D. If their profits were cut in half they would still be ridiculously profitable. Half of a fortune is still a fortune. I only care about the prices because we're talking about people's lives here. If Apple wanted to charge $1000 for an iPhone, more power to them if they could get that price. But when it comes to matters of public health we need to scrutinize profits more carefully in this case.
I don't care what anyone says, I can't find a way to justify the fact that someone in New Zealand is paying $6 for a drug that cost $100 in America. If Pharma's profits were negligible, I think I could much more easily swallow that bitter pill, no pun intended. But when they are making fantastic profits already, even more than the oil industry, how can we rationalize such disparity in pricing?