Declining life expectancy

VFK57 said:
I added the suggested allowable charge( see the 15℅ quote). However I strongly disagree on medication development cost. My wife works for decades in pharmaceutical companies in accounting. She knows that to develop a break through medication cost a lot.
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Ask your wife how much they spend on marketing. Maybe she'll tell us that 9 of 10 pharmaceutical companies spend more on advertising than on R&D. Those ads they run incessantly on TV? That's the tip of the iceberg--for every $1 they spend on those ads directed at consumers, they spend $8 marketing to doctors. That's a lot of free trips, free meals, and other stuff. Paid for by all of us, because the cash spigot just stays turned on full blast.



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How do the pharmas get so much money to spend on advertisements? From the high prices of their drugs, of course. And they have to charge high prices, because of the expenses of advertisement. Chicken and the egg...

I have not watched TV for a while, but still remember seeing all kinds of ads asking potential customers to pester their doctors for the featured drugs. Now, you would think that if the drugs are so good, they would not need to advertise so heavily. The truth is that many of these drugs are not that good, compared to older drugs that are inexpensive. For example, is Vioxx really better than Advil, or just different and having more side effects?

I think the consumers are at blame here too. We have become a pill-popping population, and expect to have a magical pill for any of our ailments to melt them away. And costs be damned.
 
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Anyway, we are getting away from the OP's topic: decline of life expectancy.

If we take away the illicit drug related fatalities, do people live longer? Every so often, a thread would start with the topic of longevity, and posters would cite some optimistic studies claiming that most of us will live to be centenarians. I have my doubt.
 
Not sure what other pharmaceutical companies spend on advertisement vs R&D but a company DW works for r&d is far outwait advertisements. I think the cost of health care is related to life expectancy because despite ACA there are still too many people live without med insurance or cannot afford co pays while having basic plans unexpectedly need to cover huge payments thrown at them.
 
Are we sure that the noted difference isn't the as weather is to climate. When pundits try to explain every movement of the stock market we tend to chuckle, is this different. There may be many reasons why a dip could occur but I'd like to see a few more years of data before I would be convinced that there was a real trend (even if there could be reasons for that too).
 
The important point is that 85% of prescriptions are for generic medicines, whose developement was already paid for. Further consider the number of adds for lawyers to due drug companies over adverse reactions to their drugs. This is why IMHO generics are better independent of the costs, by the time the drug goes generic if there are any bad adverse reactions they will have shown up due to the larger population that has taken them.
 
6miths said:
Are we sure that the noted difference isn't the as weather is to climate. When pundits try to explain every movement of the stock market we tend to chuckle, is this different. There may be many reasons why a dip could occur but I'd like to see a few more years of data before I would be convinced that there was a real trend (even if there could be reasons for that too).
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I agree a dip doesn't make a trend. It'll be interesting to see if this holds up over a few more years.

I've read a few articles on this and they mention a few death categories that are up: drug overdoses, car crashes, and suicides.

Also, you're always going to see shifts among the categories. As one type of death goes down, others go up. Old folks die of different things than youngsters or midsters.

You can't eliminate deaths. Best case you only postpone them some.
 
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