Re:$1,000 Hepatitis Pill Shows Why Fixing Health Costs Is So...
by SilasX on Monday August 04, 2014 @03:34PM
(#8133581)
>My point is that marketing for medicine is an almost 100% waste for society as a whole. It serves no useful purpose except to move market shares between functionally identical products.
If people could instantly know about which drugs are relevant to them, or doctors meticulously searched the literature for all available treatments for all patients, then alerting the world about the existence of your new drug would be a complete waste. But we don't live in that world.
If pharmas really are offering identical products, that's a problem of creating unnecessary drugs, not marketing per se, and would be exposed when the relevant people make the cost benefit calculation.
If people could instantly know about which drugs are relevant to them, or doctors meticulously searched the literature for all available treatments for all patients, then alerting the world about the existence of your new drug would be a complete waste. But we don't live in that world.
If pharmas really are offering identical products, that's a problem of creating unnecessary drugs, not marketing per se, and would be exposed when the relevant people make the cost benefit calculation.