this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 100 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Literally almost every drug in existance.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Then after the parent rubs out, they make a slightly different version and repatent it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

Insulin: new formula now 0.0005% more effective for only 9000% increase in profit!

[–] PutangInaMo 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Whoo boy that typo had me going at first lol

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[–] blazera 99 points 8 months ago (2 children)

article doesnt present any pressure they are facing. also

Drug production costs are often shrouded in secrecy with little clarity on how they relate to prices, if at all.

Prices are never about cost, its what people are willing to pay. Which gets brutally exploited by pharmaceutical industry.

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[–] unreasonabro 61 points 8 months ago (8 children)

obviously

anybody who believes pharma costs are justified by materials is... well, let's just call them uninformed. It's not justified by R&D costs or production issues. It's justified by the stock market, by the CEO having a race with other pharma CEOs for the biggest bonus, and by no other thing.

[–] HessiaNerd 23 points 8 months ago (12 children)

I work in med device, close to pharma, but a bit different. There is a lot of overhead. Beyond all the validations required for startup of each line, there is quite a lot of Sustaining work.

I'm not trying to defend this price, or the gouging that pharma does regularly. But I don't think the $5 price includes all the overhead of the QMS.

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[–] BradleyUffner 7 points 8 months ago

It's justified by asking "how much money can we suck out of the people it helps?"

[–] EnderMB 7 points 8 months ago

I'm sure there are some costs associated with developing drugs, and I'm sure it's not cheap.

The problem still stands, though, and the solution is capping executive pay in public companies.

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[–] ChowJeeBai 49 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Meanwhile volvo assigns the patent for the 3-point seatbelt to the public domain because it will save countless lives.

[–] FlyingSquid 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A Swedish company not being evil? What are they, the opposite of America?

[–] TeenieBopper 9 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Novo Nordisk is a Danish company, not American.

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[–] cosmicrookie 44 points 8 months ago (13 children)

Double pop! First time I've seen a privacy popup on top of a privacy popup. The top one you can only accept.

[–] RagingRobot 14 points 8 months ago

Extra privacy wow!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

Ah I see they are going the Roku route.

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[–] FuglyDuck 43 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Well you see… there’s the yacht, the yacht they have to land the helicopter, and the smallish yacht they use to go into port because berths at dock are hard to come by.

Oh and the. There’s the helicopter, the pilots, the mansion in every state. Except, uh, the ones that tax rich people.

It’s all part of the cost…

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[–] MapleEngineer 35 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (10 children)

CAD$650/month in Canada. I've lost 36 Kg (80 lbs) and I'm still losing weight. My blood work shows no signs of diabetes, my cardiac indicators are also excellent, but my hemoglobin is low because I don't eat beef anymore (not because of the Ozempic, I haven't been able to digest it for about six years.) I'm taking an iron supplement to build it back up.

Ozempic sucks until you stop fighting it. After that it's an easy ride.

I'm wearing an XL t-shirt and large sweat pants today down from 3XL in both eight months ago.

[–] return2ozma 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] MapleEngineer 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It acts by slowing down the emptying of your stomach. That means that whatever you eat stays in your stomach for many hours. If you eat too much at night or something that is acidy or spicy it causes terrible heart burn and reflux/regurgitation. I take an omeprazole with sodium bicarbonate at bedtime to relieve the acid.

I eat a granola bar or a couple of eggs for breakfast then a small bowl of whatever is on offer for dinner and that's it. My stomach is never empty. Sometimes, if I want to have something spicy or acidy I will have it for breakfast. I've had a fajita for breakfast and I once had chicken parm for breakfast. Then I eat something easy for dinner.

The most upsetting side effect was the fact that I went from a daily bathroom guy to every three or four days. I was eating so much less and my body was making such good use of what I ate that I just didn't produce much. It can cause constipation but you need to avoid taking laxatives because you can become dependant. Just drink lots of water, eat lots of fiber, and walk a lot and you will be fine.

If you fight it it's going to make you miserable. If you lean in you will lose a lot of weight fast. I've lost so much weight so quickly that my body freaks me out a bit. When I'm sitting on the edge of the bed and look down at my legs I don't recognize them. I told someone a few weeks ago that I just wanted a little candy because I'm fat and she said, "No you're not."

On the plus side I mentioned to my doctor that I was getting shorter (in in my late 50s and went from 5' 10 1/2" to 5' 9 1/2" and he asked, "Your penis?" I said, "No, that's getting longer!" He laughed and said, "It was hiding." I've actually gained an inch and a half of useable penis. (That's a happy side effect.)

[–] FlyingSquid 7 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Ozempic sucks until you stop fighting it. After that it’s an easy ride.

Are there plateaus like with other weight loss?

I'm not eating any solid food due to a medical issue (long story) and I have lost 80 pounds as well. My weight can drop very quickly sometimes, as much as a pound every few days. Other times, like recently, it takes a long time to go down. It's taken me a good two months to go from 190 to 180, whereas I was 260 at the start of January 2023.

If not eating enough period causes plateaus, I would think Ozempic would as well.

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[–] QuarterSwede 31 points 8 months ago (2 children)

There’s a lot of mistrust with drug makers at the moment, for good reason and this is a great article on the breakdown of costs. They do have a point about recouping the cost of R&D but maybe they should be more transparent about how long it’ll take them to do so. MBAs are very good at pulling levers to make money, they just don’t think about the human element, which is the most important lever.

[–] MirthfulAlembic 19 points 8 months ago

Two points about R&D costs:

First, they aren't just trying to make up what they spent on this treatment, but others that failed during research/trials. There's a lot of them the general public will never hear about, and pharmas generally don't like to bring attention to their failures. Part of that is many shareholders are morons who don't understand how science works.

Second, the costs can get fuzzier for larger companies who in-house much of the R&D process, since the costs get shared among many programs. Properly attributing spend in that case can be a serious challenge.

All that said, they've clearly seen an opportunity to rake it in with this trendy drug and are charging way more than they need to.

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[–] STOMPYI 18 points 8 months ago

Guys our government is broken.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As I read that they charge just 155 bucks in other countries I guess the high price lies in not having a suitable health care system. You can't have both, calling other countries socialists or communists AND having good health care by having the same contracts that we have. Sorry.

[–] systemglitch 17 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Universal Health Care is what Americans should be rioting for. It is THE game changer in QoL and what really separats a first world country from a second world country.

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[–] mechoman444 16 points 8 months ago (4 children)

$1500. That's how much eight weeks of ozempic costs for me if I had to pay out of pocket.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

Seriously, no kidding but sometimes I think that people are still discovering capitalism

[–] Olhonestjim 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

I'm diabetic, and also have a few mental health issues. The doc took me off Ozempic, citing it's side affects of messing with mental health.

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[–] aeronmelon 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Guy looks like Bill Gates without hair.

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[–] unreasonabro 9 points 8 months ago

well you know the old adage, the bigger the margin, the better the rape

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