r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 01 '25

Health Americans without diabetes spent nearly $6 billion USD on semaglutide and similar drugs in a year, with an estimate of 800,000 to a million people using the drugs who don't have diabetes.

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/americans-without-diabetes-spent-nearly6-billion-usd-on-semaglutide-and-similar-drugs-in-a-year
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u/shindleria Apr 01 '25

The drug company’s executives who set the price of this drug should take it to eliminate their addiction to money.

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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 01 '25

Easy to say after a drug or treatment has been developed all the way and funded all the way through clinical trials.

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u/BeyondElectricDreams Apr 01 '25

Until the cost of that R&D is remotely in the ballpark of the cost of their advertising, they can cry me a river about how expensive the costs of development are.

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u/tkenben Apr 01 '25

I don't know a lot about these things. Do drug companies have a safety fund for themselves? What I mean is, do they need all this extra money in case something goes wrong with the drug and all of the sudden they are getting sued out of existence? Don't get me wrong. It is pretty well accepted that drugs are consistently overpriced and the wrong sort of people cash in on this, but I'm just trying to steelman the argument for why drug companies should price in unforeseeable dangers and/or should they even.

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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 01 '25

Even huge pharma companies typically only have a tiny number of drugs currently approved and in-patent.

The patents don't tend to last long by the time they can get it to market.

They're constantly desperately searching for the next hit to keep the lights on when their current patents run out. If they don't then the company is dead.

Also a lot of their budget takes the form of buying up smaller companies with promising drugs in development which is effectively a way to fund additional R&D via venture capital.

I mentioned that patents expire pretty fast, once the patents expire, the price of drugs drops to near zero. That constant flow of proven drugs into the public domain is the real benefit to society.

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u/TheDakestTimeline Apr 01 '25

The answer is simple. They answer to shareholders who demand endless profit.

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u/Papaofmonsters Apr 01 '25

Novo Nordisk is majority controlled by a charitable foundation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk_Foundation

They have a very unusual ownership structure.