Does the pharmaceutical agency really care about your health, or making billions in profit?

If I recall we discussed this in another thread but companies to put money into basic research. Many Universities get funding from from corporate donors. Also companies like google have been doing basic research themselves into things that either have no immediate application or are a very long way out from a profitable application.

 

Killing the messenger falsely implies you're relaying complete or accurate information without separate commentary, or fishing for some kind of ad hominem attack by asking about my "line of work." Nobody's being defensive, just remembering the last time you tried to string together a narrative with little to no accurate info.

 

Yes

 

False binary choice. Two seemingly opposite things can be simultaneously true.

 

Most of the human beings working at the pharmacy companies care, but the corporate pigs in the suits in the high rises care about profit above all else. They may say they care about people, but if it came to profit versus someone not getting their drug, that same person would tell you that they gotta eat, too, despite bringing home 4 million dollars a year.


Doesn't matter what this is being driven by, whether it be shareholders, personal greed, or something else. I'm sure there are many exceptions, too, but as a general rule, this holds true.

 

I think this is a bit of prejudice and generalization. Contrary to popular belief, people in the C-Suite are not inherently evil.

 

It probably is a little bit of an inherent prejudice, to be honest. It's reinforced by local healthcare companies, as well as stories about how many prescription drugs rose by an average of over 30% in the last year or so.


You ever watched a person on anti-rejection meds shiver and convulse with a high fever because they couldn't afford them, as they lay there two days from death? I bet the C-Suiters haven't either. Unfortunately, it will cause some sort of inherent prejudice. Especially when you see or hear about these scenarios many times over.

I get that I don't know these people, and I'm sure many of them are just like me, but let's not deny that big pharma and their constituents are out to make as much money as possible, and they spend as much money as anyone in lobbying to ensure that they're able to do so. Let's not pretend that this comes as people who need their products are suffering due to costs and lack of accessibility. Why are many of these drugs made overseas? There are many questions and too few people with power that are willing to try and find answers.


And it's a huge problem within our country.

 

Let's also not deny that big pharma saves lives.

Simultaneously, drugs invented and marketed by American companies have saved more lives than drugs from any other country ...probably all other countries combined. (I don't have the facts to back this up but it's probably true)

Agree that they should be held in check and not over charging but their contribution to society is invaluable. Rather than demonizing, find the middle ground.

 

I'd say they are no more evil than anyone else, though their sins of choice might over-index in the worldly success department, since that's how they got there in the first place. But CEOs (and all us corporate-slave types) have a moral obligation, a fiduciary duty, to fulfill the promises made to the shareholders who own the companies, and those generally include maximizing profit. Caring for people is great, but I'd say a CEO that gives away his employer's wealth because he feels some personal obligation to care is actually doing something immoral by betraying the trust placed in him and abusing his position of power to play Robin Hood by robbing his employers and giving the proceeds to the poor. Which is what some in this thread want pharma companies to do. It's not on the CEO or any employee to use the machinery of the corporation to look out for the welfare of the customers (though they can certainly give of their own personal wealth) -- the Board of Directors needs to set that mandate and have it legitimized by the shareholders in shareholder meetings.

I think we need to be more specific about who we're talking about when we talk about pharmaceutical companies. It's not the employees. If they fail to care for the welfare of patients, it's the shareholders doing that. And the whole system of stock ownership encourages an amoral, unfeeling focus on maximizing profit. Two approaches to fixing it I can think of at the moment are: (1) change the structure of the market and/or regulatory regime to better align profitability with patient welfare, or (2) have some very rich people consolidate enough power on a Board to direct the company toward (and to evaluate the performance of the CEO on) achieving metrics other than profit. Both are hard to accomplish.

 

I'd say it's complicated.....

Personally, I am more outraged at our food and beverage industry that pretty much gets subsidized to produce obesity. Not to mention Big Agriculture/Big Corn who just loves growing food food for fuel or HCFs.

 

Amen

 

For those still confused,

What is your singular interest when you purchase shares of a company in stocks? That is the same exact interest of those who run publicly traded pharmaceuticals.

 

I'm about to start calling you Forrest Gump you claim to be linked to almost every thread topic in the D&D.

Have you quizzed all of these people you worked with?

Is this a topic that just randomly comes up?

Care about patients as opposed to what?

 

Says who?

Is that like a law or something?

Does that mean maximizing profits at all cost and no thought about the employees?

 

Shareholder value is residual value.

 

??? Shareholders own the company. They vote on who is on the Board of Directors. The BoD hires the CEO. If a CEO isn't maximizing profits, the Board will get rid of him, lest the shareholders vote them out.

About 10 years ago, the CEO of NRG (for whom I did not work, n.b.) decided to transform the company to transition to green energy. He sold dirty assets, bought clean start-ups, invested in carbon capture pilots, etc. I watched the stock drop and drop for a year. The Board initially said they supported him, but the stock became significantly undervalued on the fundamentals and big shareholders were pressuring the Board. So they fired him and made their COO, who ran their power plants, CEO. He said the company would get back to their bread and butter of burning fossil fuels and the stock bounced back. Even when you're the boss, you can't just do what you want. Everybody's gotta serve somebody.

(The fired CEO said in a later interview that he wished he had moved faster so he could have done more irreversible transformations before getting the boot. Though it probably would have gotten him fired quicker too.)

 

I don't see what that has to do with anything I said.

My point is that's not a law and the board of directors does not have to want to maximize profits at all cost, you act like this is some kind inealiable right.

Yeah, everybody gotta serve somebody but everybody does not have to maximize profits to the detriment of everything else, this is just as much a fault of the shareholders.

 

Hence why transitioning out of fossil fuels using the market is not a thing. Companies are going to stick to the product they are very efficient at maximizing profit in.