Who here thinks drug companies (pharmaceuticals) are altruistic...

[Buckeye_Democrat]

28. Several of the scientists and their other employees...

... are surely altruistic, but not the executives at the top so much.

And maybe even those executives would be more altruistic in a different system? Corporations were designed to focus on profits.

Apparently, investors in the past considered it too much work for them to manage businesses themselves. So corporations were legally defined with profit-focused safeguards so the actual managers wouldn't forget to make more money for the investor class. (That's my interpretation of what happened when corporations were legally defined long ago, anyway.)

Some of those companies are shady as hell. I used to regularly get injections of an anti-cancer drug called Avastin in my eyes. It was meant as a treatment for colon cancer, to be administered by IV's, but it didn't work very well. So hospitals often stopped using it.

Later, some ophthalmologists in Florida decided to try that drug to treat macular degeneration of the eyes. It worked great for that application! So ophthalmologists all around the country bought unused bags of the drug from hospitals and divided it into much smaller doses to be injected in the eyes of their macular degeneration patients.

Was the company (Genentech) satisfied with the good fortune that others found a way to use that drug successfully? Nope.

They instead followed it up with their own research and applied for FDA approval for a slight chemical alteration (which they called Lucentis) to use it for treating macular degeneration.

THEN they appealed to the government to make the injection of Avastin into eyes illegal! They argued that eye doctors could be careless and allow Avastin to get contaminated with microbes otherwise!

Meanwhile, they would charge over $2000 for each injection of Lucentis while Avastin usually cost less than $300 per injection!

Thankfully, eye doctors all over the country basically told Genentech to eat shit, because they were going to continue to offer the cheaper Avastin to their patients! Genentech then backed down from their government efforts.

Thank you, medical doctors!!

I struggled to pay for Avastin back then, and I would've definitely went blind if I had to pay over $2000 per shot instead. And because the FDA approval of Lucentis was only for age-related macular degeneration (the most common problem), and not my type of macular degeneration, my health insurance wouldn't have helped to pay for it just like they didn't pay for my Avastin injections.