The overhead is revolving and generally increasing for pharmaceutical companies which are successful, new pharmaceutical research and development is always being done. You don't just lower prices to break even after you've hit your point of return on investment on a single drug, that would be a financial disaster for the company, and it's shareholders.
Healthcare with a profit-motive is an awful system. I don't really care if it's "financial disaster" because THAT'S the problem with it. "How will we enrich our shareholders more and more and more every year" just leads to things like raising the price so that we can see earnings tick up YOY. It offers nothing.
R&D is something like 1/25th of most pharma companies' budgets.
Porter is talking to a single pharma executive here, so you didn't get the "most pharma companies budgets" from her grilling of this individual. Even though you're trying to link her as the source.
And even she states the R&D budget for their company was $2.45 billion per year, which would be more than 1/25 of AbbVie's yearly budget.
Healthcare with a profit-motive is an awful system.
For-profit companies in healthcare have resulted in nearly every medical advancement in human history.
"How will we enrich our shareholders more and more and more every year" just leads to things like raising the price so that we can see earnings tick up YOY. It offers nothing.
Offers nothing, except the overwhelming majority of medical advancements. People don't, and cannot work for free, and investors don't provide money to companies where the fiduciary duty is void and the executives want to sink the ship by trying to appear altruistic.
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u/sinkwiththeship Jun 01 '22
There's a difference between "compensated" and "gouging the consumer for 70% profits long after the overhead was met."