Daily pill can cut AIDS risk for gay men, study finds

[T-Rexx]

I am 100% a free market capitalist, so I think the drug companies can pursue whatever they want. And I am a total 100% libertarian, so i feel that people are free to do whatever they want, so long as they don't harm anyone else. So if drug companies want to make it, and people want to take it, there's not a damn thing I would do about it no matter what my opinion of it is.

Capitalism is wonderful. But appreciate that the medical industry is not free market capitalism.

When you are having a heart attack, you don't go to the hospital 20 miles away which is having a special on heart attacks. You don't decide on angioplasty instead of bypass because you figure you can save a little money that way. When you've got an infection, you don't go into a pharmacy and buy whatever antibiotic is cheapest. And when you want to prevent HIV, you don't go into a pharmacy and buy generic Videx instead of Truvada because you figure it'll probably work well enough for you to get by for now.

Medicine and pharmaceuticals are an industry where monopoly and market exclusivity are the norm. The people paying the bills are not the people utilizing the services. Customers are not free to choose the product or the pricing or even the vendor they might prefer. Market forces do not (indeed, cannot) set pricing in this field.

So, don't expect that some drug company is going to discount a product in the hope of making more money by selling more product. This industry does not work that way.

 

[T-Rexx]

Perhaps. But some ethically-challenged healthcare providers decide to advise/push certain treatments because they can make more money by doing so.

Hopefully, that is quite rare. But it is the lack of a free market which makes medicine somewhat more susceptible to this temptation than certain other industries.

But I do buy generic cetirizine instead of brand-name Zyrtec, and generic acetaminophen instead of brand-name Tylenol. And I would buy the generic ingredients that are in Truvada if I couldn't afford brand-name Truvada.

You cannot buy the generic ingredients in Truvada without a prescription. You must first negotiate your purchase with a physician, who will charge you for a consultation and who may have his own ideas about how to proceed. Then, you have the intervention of your insurance company, which may decide for whatever reason that it will pay for some of the generics but not others. Or, it may decide not to pay for anything at all. Or, it may impose conditions (such as demonstrating every six months by blood testing that you are still HIV-negative) before it agrees to pay for anything. Also, what your insurance does or does not pay for often changes on a monthly basis.

You are not free to make decisions on your own. I'm not saying that that is inappropriate - only that it is not an example of a free market. So, market forces do not drive pricing. Medicine is not free market capitalism.

Unless you happen to be one of the 1 in 6 Americans (1 in 5 African Americans, 1 in 3 Hispanic Americans) who has no health insurance coverage, assuming you even seek treatment.

Even if you are one of the many Americans without health care, you are still not operating in a free market system. You still have the regional monopolies granted to hospitals, the market exclusivity granted by pharmaceutical patents, and the necessary (and expensive) need for the intervention of a doctor in nearly all therapy decisions. Because the doctor decides the course of therapy but does not pay the bills, you still have a third party driving cost decisions who is not involved financially in the transaction. The uninsured patient still has no (or very little) influence on the cost of therapy or even the vendor chosen to provide it.

Insured or uninsured, healthcare is not free market captialsim. It does not, therefore, respond to market forces in the ways that consumers always seem to expect.

Do not expect that Truvada or even its component ingredients will come down in price because a potential new use has been discovered for it - not even if that new use drives its sales way, way up. This industry does not work that way.