Al Mann, a scientist who gave all his fortune to philanthropy and founded the company Mankind to market a revolutionary type of insulin that gives diabetics unprecedented control over the blood sugar (google Afrezza)
Here's a letter (edited for length ) he wrote from the congressional record:
The Senate has just passed a bill to speed the availability of generic drugs. Hopefully that bill will die in the House. I say that the problem is not the pricing of drugs but the cost. What are needed are means for effectively lowering the expense and time to get a new drug approved. That would lower the costs and hopefully the pricing of drugs, and that would certainly be a worthwhile objective. I am shocked and disappointed at the lack of understanding of this issue by the Congress. I certainly agree that we must seek ways to lower health care expense. I say that to do so we must focus on ways to LOWER the COST of providing health care NOT just targeting the PRICE. There are multiple reasons for the price of drugs, but I assert that the earlier generic drug law has actually led to an INCREASE in the PRICING of drugs. It takes as long as 15 years—or even longer—and $1–$1.5 billion to gain regulatory approval of a new drug. With only 20 years of exclusivity before a generic drug is approved it should be obvious that the price of a new drug must be very high just to recover the development cost let alone a profit. Even the price of the generic version of a drug is typically only moderately discounted from the innovative drug rather than priced based on the manufacturing cost. If you question the impact of the current generic drug law just ask yourself how many $5 and $10 drugs there were before that law. It only costs pennies to make a pill. However, only by charging high prices can the high costs of pharma development be recovered with any profit during the brief period of patent protection remaining after regulatory approval. Passing legislation to further ease and speed the availability of generic drugs will not likely lower pricing; if anything it would likely just reduce innovation of new drugs. That slowing is already beginning; most of the major pharma companies have already begun downsizing R&D. Surely that is not in our interest when there are new advanced technologies that could significantly improve and extend life. We need to evaluate how we can speed and lower the cost of bringing a new drug to market rather than counting on the generics. There are various approaches that should be explored. One approach might be to delay approval of a generic to allow more time of exclusivity rather than to ease the generic regulatory process. There was such a delay built into the earlier bills, but that was certainly not adequate. Unfortunately it will not be easy to reverse the pricing practices of drugs—the companies and Wall Street have all gotten used to the high prices. Of course the price of drugs is but a tiny part of the cost of health care. We ought to be reexamining many aspects of our health care system. We do need to reduce the price of health care—including the cost and the price of drugs. However, the challenge is not so simple as just approving generic drugs more quickly. In fact the problem is not just the pricing; today many potentially valuable improvements and even new breakthrough drugs do not ever reach the market because of the regulatory hurdles. This problem and the costs will certainly become far greater as we move to more personalized medicine. The consequence of easing the creation of generics may even worsen from what we see today; future breakthrough therapies may simply not become available in the U.S.! I just heard from a very credible person of a meeting of 12 advanced pharma companies discussing how to deal with the current regulatory challenges. I am told that 11 of those 12 companies are intending to launch their new products outside the U.S. and just to ignore the U.S. patients. … Yet I am so disgusted by the overly restrictive process to medical innovation that has been created by our government that I have begun to sell off most of my several ventures. It is no longer worth the effort and the agony. I am sending this communication to all the Representatives whose e-mail addresses I have. I would appreciate your forwarding this to your other colleagues. ALFRED E. MANN.
https://www.congress.gov/crec/2012/06/07/CREC-2012-06-07-pt1-PgH3584-4.pdf …
if u r diabetic https://afrezza.com/