"We’re taking money from the Medicare pot and sliding it over to big Pharma"

Avastin vs Lucentis…

The government is also conducting a head-to-head study of the two.

I posted my original thoughts about Lucentis when this story first broke, and my further thoughts about the more recent development about the government study as well.

Genentech really screwed themselves on this one, I think.

“I think we need to eventually have limits on drug profits, accompanied by some tax considerations for drug companies to allow them to continue research.”

That will never happen, thank God.

As you can read in the article, the free-market is going to naturally correct the imbalance. Limits on profits wouldn’t fix anything, and would very likely kill a company’s incentive to innovate. Every big pharma company is looking for the next blockbuster — artificially limiting the ceiling is just going to piss people off. (Those people are investors who will simply vote with their dollars by going into other industries and countries.)

Better off doing it to Big Oil first, anyway. The American people would appreciate it more.

Price ceilings — which is what you’re advocating, though you may not know it — don’t work. Just look at the NYC housing market pre- and post-de-regulation.

You’d also run into the problem of setting a profit ceiling. Are all drugs created equal? How do you decide what a specific drug should be allowed to make in profit? Are we talking profit per dose? Profit per year? Profit as a percent of revenue?

Thank God profit ceilings will never happen in the United States. The government’s big enough as it is, thanks, without screwing things up even more. Rely on private companies instead of Big Brother to correct imbalances. It works better, faster, and more efficiently in the long-term. When businesses all compete for their bottom lines — especially in an interconnected economy like healthcare — you don’t need profit ceilings, because these ceiling occur naturally without Big Brother’s oversight.

In the case of the the .gov, they’re doing the right thing by getting indirectly involved by pitting Avastin and Lucentis head-to-head. When the findings emerge, we’ll see the pricing change drastically, I think.