By 40% you mean about 13%, right? https://usafacts.org/government-spending/

We haven’t had 40% of spending in defense since about the time we put a man on the moon.

So we CAN afford these drugs to begin with, because employer sponsored health plans with minimal coverage cost around $14000 and have $6500++ copays (I don’t remember today’s limits for copays, but you have to pay those copays out of pocket before an insurance company covers drugs typically.) The actual drugs cost pennies to make but sell for hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands. The prices that are listed for these drugs at retail are not actually what the insurance pays for these drugs, we’re never going to see those figures, but they’re aligned to maximize profits from the industry. Pharmacy benefit managers also collude by using a third party service to recommend pricing.

I’m too lazy to find good sources of material, but revenue in the US for pfizer is more in the US than the rest of the world combined. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267877/revenues-of-pfizer-in-submarkets-worldwide/ (I was able to view this without a subscription.)

Last year they had about ~63600 million in revenue. ~38691 million last year was in the US alone.

~16057 for “developed markets” aka europe and wealthy nations ~8879 for “developing nations” e.g. africa, latin america, poor asian countries.

So 38 billion in the us vs 63.6 billion total revenue.

If you have to choose between keeping US revenue or keeping non-us global revenue, you’re gonna choose the US. It’s not even close.

I’m guessing they can license their drug to some other business to sell internationally and get out of first party sales, but it’s possible they may have a legal mechanism to skirt this already since it’s typical for the US business to be a separate company than the holding company, and all the international businesses are separate companies under said holding company, it’s hard to say. I don’t have any inside information for today’s strategy.

Just to tack onto this… it’s possible that we will see different branded drugs, and perhaps even slightly modified drugs to contain effectively a placebo to go through clinical trials concurrently with the primary drug. From there they just release one drug in the US and the other drug exclusively everywhere else.

That’s just one creative way to keep prices exorbitantly high. They can also target medical devices aka the delivery mechanism (think pre-packaged syringes) to try and keep profits high. Just release a US only delivery mechanism and suddenly it’s different than the rest of the world. I’ve worked at companies that slightly altered the injector of their drugs to keep their monopoly going, as doctors preferred the improved injector that had no generic due to being in copyright, even after the drug patent expired.

The pharma lobby is so wealthy and powerful though I sincerely doubt even dumpy can fight them. There’s a reason why biden started with just a handful of drugs, it built a foundation to slowly drain their profits while their current patents run out and they adapt to the new dynamic.

There’s also all those health insurance companies that legally can only profit a % of overall revenue that will face severe profit cuts if treatment costs actually dive, drugs are a key component to building a sizable margin today.___

The gravy train of giant margin drugs is coming to an end.

Medicaid is gonna get gutted and drugs won’t be very profitable in the US overall. I suspect the pharma answer to this may be suspending sales in all other nations so long as the US patents are live, the profits here are so above and beyond all other places in the world that there’s little reason to focus on global markets if the restriction is lowest common denominator pricing in the US.

I worked in pharma for a while at a level that interacted with C level executives and the executive leadership of said companies. I’ve seen where the money is and seen internal numbers. US oncology sales are almost all profits.

Wow, look at that! The price of strollers just went up 5k!

Replace strollers with basically anything related to birth or infants. 5k more to spend? 5k more to earn by big business selling wares.

This assumes the hospital doesn’t determine that you seem to owe 5k more for that one out of network service provider they slipped in while you were distracted during birthing.

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oh god utah. Can’t wait to see all the mormons without front teeth in 20 years.

Sir! Fresh off the presses, water is wet!

Can my line show up in the press now too?

They paid in cash per TFA

cause meet effect

I can’t believe investors were OK with him selling twitter to another company he co-owns.

Didn’t he just make stupid billions from his ponzi coin scheme?

allegedly influencing the 2024 election

Where are the damages again?

Good to know that our elected officials in the legislative branch are no longer able to create laws that are actually enacted.

This shit is outside the scope of the presidency.

how the fuck have we not yet solved phone audio quality and consistency problems.

Blame apple

she was a terrible candidate, but how in the world did Trump not motivate people to vote for her?

Easy, as you said: she was a terrible candidate

They wanted to get that first woman “status quo” president again. It lost them more votes than it won. I can’t believe they didn’t even have another round of primaries.

When they shut out bernie they really fucked the party. This timeline is their fault as much as anyone else’s.

Every major decision in this country seems to end up going the way the wealthy want.

They definitely want this to have maximum punishment to deter copycats.

This will never happen. You won’t find a jury in the country that will unanimously give a not guilty verdict. Best case is a hung jury twice in a row leading to a mistrial. Worst case they find one of the loopholes that lets the judge decide or they unanimously declare him guilty.

They don’t worry about all the school shootings because their kids go to private school which is a big reason why nothing is done (24 private school shootings vs 392 public school shootings for the past 25 years or so.) The working class families are the victims, so nobody in power really cares beyond lip service.

I’m fine with prices going sky high so long as we are eliminating exploited labor.

The reality is though these folks will seek jobs elsewhere and without any social safety nets they are in for some harsh times. I can only hope they have enough friends and family here to make it.

Doesn’t work because the legal body is republican controlled. Only republican choices are above the law.

We’re no better than Russia.

Gulag for you, comrade.

Maybe the US needs more political prisoners so we can be up to par from the minority parties. The hatred is almost there amongst the loyalists to the billionaire elite. Just check out a fox news comments section, they’d love to shoot some democrats up. They don’t even consider them human anymore.

I can’t believe how mass media is turning people into monsters who cheer for the death of hard working working class families while the billionaires get bigger and bigger handouts from tax dollars.

Because the wealthy are always made whole. It’s only the working class who can’t stand up for themselves who are generally taken advantage of by insurance agencies.