> Wait times in much of Europe are kind of ridiculous.
It's prioritized as per need, for example elective/preventative operations or procedures will be delayed if there is a new higher level emergency, this makes practical sense given the nature of healthcare and I have never had a problem with that.
It's slightly off topic though, my comment was off the cuff but it's a reality.
> Your preference appears to be financial.
Well regardless of financial accessibility if you can justify why in the US the markup of pharmaceuticals is so extraordinarily high for everything vs the rest of the world ?
> Well regardless of financial accessibility if you can justify why in the US the markup of pharmaceuticals is so extraordinarily high for everything vs the rest of the world ?
We do a lot of the (very expensive) drug discovery and testing.
And that means those same drugs, from those same companies are now cheaper outside of the US? That makes zero sense. That's like Amazon charging their employees 100x to use AWS vs outside people.
They charge more in the US because they can, because of people who gleefully accept it and defend it by saying "we do a lot of expensive drug discovery and testing"
> And that means those same drugs, from those same companies are now cheaper outside of the US?
Drug development essentially results in the creation of very expensive intellectual property. A wide variety of drugs are easy and cheap to manufacture [1].
The cost to develop a drug can range from $314 million to $2.8 billion [2]. Fewer than 8% of drugs make it through the development and trial process [3]. It's super expensive and risky.
Other countries do not have to respect US drug IP and can produce these drugs for near zero cost. They benefit from the expensive drug discovery and vetting that the US pharmaceutical industry perform and the US FDA requires, but they don't have to pay for any of it.
When countries do pay for US drug IP, they do a lot of strong arm bargaining. If this happened in the US, many of the drugs, especially for rarer illnesses, wouldn't be developed in the first place.
[1] Gene therapies, monoclonal antibodies, viral vectors, and other types of treatments not so much.
In some cases. But the point is other countries enforce lower prices, and they make up the margins in the US. On the one hand it is obscene but on the other we do see a pretty regular supply of miraculous new drugs. Something clearly needs done but the system does make sense (whether or not its optimal).
Re the comment about the US doing a lot of the very expensive parts of drug development...
Where are the costs, and what would it take to break tyem down?
For example if the costs are in screening molecular candidates, that could be done in a lab on a computer in India or Vietnam just as easily as in New Jersey. If its clinical trials, Europe is cheap and Asia cheaper still, both with high quality medical staff. Etc.
Any commenters understand where the major costs are?
> For example if the costs are in screening molecular candidates, that could be done in a lab on a computer in India or Vietnam just as easily as in New Jersey.
The market can do this right now. The US has a lot of the talent and expertise, though.
> If its clinical trials, Europe is cheap and Asia cheaper still, both with high quality medical staff. Etc.
While the FDA has accepted foreign drug trials as long as they are held to FDA standards, they still prefer to have trials conducted in the US that represent a US population. And no matter the case, it's still extremely expensive to meet these requirements.
It's prioritized as per need, for example elective/preventative operations or procedures will be delayed if there is a new higher level emergency, this makes practical sense given the nature of healthcare and I have never had a problem with that.
It's slightly off topic though, my comment was off the cuff but it's a reality.
> Your preference appears to be financial.
Well regardless of financial accessibility if you can justify why in the US the markup of pharmaceuticals is so extraordinarily high for everything vs the rest of the world ?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9914690/figure/heal...
I would be VERY nervous to be in the US without fully comp insurance.