• HessiaNerd@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I work in med device, close to pharma, but a bit different. There is a lot of overhead. Beyond all the validations required for startup of each line, there is quite a lot of Sustaining work.

    I’m not trying to defend this price, or the gouging that pharma does regularly. But I don’t think the $5 price includes all the overhead of the QMS.

    • telllos@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s like taking the price of the ingredients for a pizza and saying it’s what it should cost.

        • Manmoth@lemmy.ml
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          7 months ago

          It’s really cheap to make a book but that doesn’t stop publishers from selling them at a large markup. This is a pretty basic supply/demand scenario. The pharma company doesn’t owe anyone anything. They exist to make money. The best way to lower the cost is for a competing product to enter the market.

      • xkforce@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Well if the materials to make a pizza was 5 dollars and it was being sold at 1,000 dollars, saying “oh thats just necessary overhead” would lead me to wonder why the hell that level of inefficiency was tolerated.

        • just_change_it@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          why the hell that level of inefficiency was tolerated.

          Patents, e.g. legal monopolies.

          Maybe fines and penalties for undercutting someone who holds a patent should be scrapped for nonprofit manufacturers of generics.

          Maybe profit should come second to the betterment of humanity.

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Because each new type of pizza is made of brand-new ingredients, not just standard wheat flour, tomatoes, cheese, spices, etc. And they’re baked anew and taste-tested to make sure they’re not disgusting, or worse, have toxic effects.

      • HessiaNerd@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Im not in charge of the checkbook, but I do place purchase requests. I also am in charge of reducing direct labor and know what our overhead numbers are. We are a small company though. It should be possible to reduce overhead in larger companies due to economies of scale, however, it is not always the case as the bureaucracies required to interface with the FDA are not trivial.

        I was involved with a product transfer for a large company one time. Due to the small volume of the product and the complexity of Sustaining and reporting activities it had a 60% overhead. I did look at the books on that. While that’s an extreme case, I’ve also seen product launched with 40% yield. One device I worked on was a stapler for the heart. We had to load the tiny staples into the device, fire it, evaluate the staple formation, then reset and reload the staples. It had about 80-90% yield if I remember correctly.

        These aren’t roast beef sandwiches. People die if you fuck up.

          • dynamojoe@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            …and you are shit-canning someone else’s input because they don’t know everything based on your even more limited experience, suspect knowledge, and a heavily biased opinion of how you think the world should work. Lay out your superior knowledge or admit you’re just spewing a party line for the upvotes because it sure sounds like they know a hell of a lot more about the subject than you do.