What can you tell us Yanks about Healthcare in the UK

I had to have a good, hollow laugh at this post (even though it is very old).

The problem I have with the "Universal is good and fair and private is bad" argument is that it dismisses a lot of real world issues in healthcare. Somebody has to pay for medicines. Pharmaceutical companies are easy to demonise but it's often done without looking at the facts. The lion's share of pharmaceutical companies exist in only a handful of countries for a reason.

Yes... Let's come back to that point in a moment.

It is incredibly expensive and time consuming to bring a drug to market. It takes decades. And every successful drug must pay for the research into the 999 drugs that somewhere along the line went from promising to failure. If your country has price controls then you benefit, and countries that do not, like the US, pick up the extra price. However if every country decided that nobody should have to pay more than X amount of pounds/dollars/euros then how many drugs will be researched?

You're quite right - pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit, and if there aren't any patients paying for drugs then the drugs won't be developed. For instance, the company I used to work for developed one of the most widely-used HIV treatments (often used in HAART) and was then forced to give it away for free in developing countries, leaving the company to pick up all of the initial R&D costs and the ongoing production costs. They now claim this as a huge act of altruism, but I will let you guess how much research they currently do into antiretrovirals. [None.]

Look at the leaps and strides healthcare has made and our quality of life and longevity that has benefitted. We can't simply take that for granted and assume somehow, somewhere, someone is going to pay for that, as long as it's not us or anyone we know, and believe that development will continue.

Well, there is an obvious alternative to private R&D. Public R&D? There's no compelling reason why better research would be done in a private lab. I've worked in organic chemistry both publically (universities) and privately (pharmaceuticals) and I saw more and better work being done by PhD candidates (salary approx. £12,000) than by long-term employees in pharmaceutical labs (salary approx. £60,000). The difference is that at the moment, drugs are developed in the private sector and the system isn't broken enough (at least for first world consumers) to generate the policital will for something better.

I'm biased. I worked for a pharmaceutical company that brought a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis to millions of sufferers. I showed up in the last 12 months and got to partake in the celebrations, but that journey started in the late 70s.

Athritis is a good example of a "lifestyle" disease, along with impotence, depression, insomnia, chronic pain, schitzophrenia or migraines. While these conditions are miserable if you are a sufferer, if you're being given drugs for them then you are probably someone who lives in a first world country and doesn't have to worry about malaria, etc, etc as a priority. That's why pharmaceutical companies develop them. There is money in them, because these are important problems for Americans and Europeans. There isn't money in saving lives per se. That's why some people think that a system which didn't depend solely on market forces to work would be a better idea. For instance, you could develop drugs for the most important and serious conditions, with the most sufferers. You wouldn't have to patent them. You wouldn't have to spend more money on marketing than on basic R&D, so as to wring maximum value out of your patents. You wouldn't have to distort your evidence base to show efficacy. You wouldn't have other government labs scrambling to waste huge amounts of resources (and animal lives in clinical testing) for "me too" drugs that are just different enough to patent, without providing any appreciable benefit over existing therapies...

And you don't have to be biased just because you work for a pharmaceutical company. For me, my time working for and with pharma companies was an interesting eye-opener. Lots of nice people in a ruthlessly unpleasant system.

If you're still reading, I'd be interested in knowing which area of your company you work in. Are you doing lead development, biology, process chemistry, repping, or what?