Cross-border drug buying works well in the EU, where any European country can buy drugs from any other European country, so whoever has the lowest price usually wins the market.
As a private company, your incentive is to maximize profit for shareholders. Since all you have to do is undercut high drug prices a little, what will stop you from the same price gouging that all other US drug companies perform?
On the technical level, we incorporated as a public benefit corporation, so we are judged not only on how profitable we are for shareholders, but how well be maintain our social mission. That is actually in our charter documents and is a legal requirement.
On a practical level, Mark Cuban is our lead investor and his interest is very much focused on helping people and fixing system issues in healthcare. We also did some screening to ensure our other investors are socially minded and prioritize social benefit as well as profits.
My mindset is that we need to be profitable to be sustainable and grow enough to help the overall system, but we won't be extortionate.
Also he got to write his name on it
Cost of advertising is a serious problem for generic drug makers. There are a lot of drugs where there exists an identical, cheaper, generic version, but the more expensive one gets sold because neither the doctors nor the patients have any idea that it exists. Hence all the "ask your doctor for x" ads, but the problem is that advertising on that scale, especially for low-incidence conditions, is very expensive compared to the amount of money you make, an so will result in just another expensive drug.
A celebrity putting their name on a drug company and then maybe mentioning it a few times publicly in places where normal people hear about it may make people who are facing very expensive drug bills look up the site and see if they make something useful for them.
If it’s the case where there’s an older generic and a newer product still under patent, that’s a discussion with your doctor: Is the newer product worth the money, or should I stick with the older thing?
In the longer term, success in the health space could add prestige to his name, ala the Nobel prize.
> The results show that the average annual price of top-selling cancer drugs in 2006, adjusted for inflation and secular changes in drug prices, have increased by US$154 and US$235 for branded and competitive brand drugs, respectively, following the 2010 ACA; however, generic oncology drug prices showed no significant changes.
Depends on the country. For example India is the largest generic drug manufacturer and has a population of over 1 billion, and they already export their drugs to many countries.
Couldn't Canadian drug companies increase supply if the demand was there? In the short term, sure, they would not be able to handle our level of demand, but unless there's some constraint I'm not aware of they could always just scale up and make more animal insulin or whatever.
The history is that Canada used to have "compulsory licensing" for patented drugs. Anyone could manufacture a patented drug in Canada and pay a ?6?% or whatever royalty to the patent owner and they just had to deal with it.
Over the years, first 4, then 10 years of exclusivity were provided to the patent owner.
Then the WTO came along, and presently, everyone has agreed to ~20y exclusivity and charge/pay the median price of OECD countries before it's a royalty-free free-for-all.
http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb9946-e.h...
Canadian generic drugs today aren't usually cheaper than US generics, except where patent exclusivity mismatches.
I'm not sure drug importation will work though, not because it's a bad policy per se, but I'm not sure that other countries will let the US import their low-cost medicines if US law changes in order to protect their domestic supplies.
There's Canada as an example case. We have ~10x the population of Canada, and California alone could use up all of Canada's medicines. Not sure Canada would go for it.
Think it's worth a shot though. I know there are some trial programs going into place in Colorado and Florida around allowing drug importation. Will be cool to follow and see how they play out.