Comments on: Teva Pharmaceuticals: taking over the global generic market

By: USA / toddcurl

USA / toddcurl — Mon, 17 May 2010 19:19:55 +0000

I certainly hope Teva does start taking quality control seriously — just for my own sake. I regularly take one of their meds because I have absolutely no other option; not even name brand. The name brand happens to be manufactured here in the US, but is only sold in Canada, UK and Australia.

I hope you realize how fortunate you are in Canada to have the health system you have. Unfortunately, many in this country have been duped into believing that Canada’s healthcare system is horrible and that Canadians flock to this country in droves to take advantage of our superior system. The media always finds some poor schlob, supposedly from Canada, to speak of the horrors of socialized medicine.

Quite comical. We’ll see what happens with Teva. They’re bound to start breaking some antitrust laws soon and actually just lost a patent claim — hopefully the tricks they acquired from Barr are starting to wear thin.

By: Canada / Pat Morin

Canada / Pat Morin — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:58:07 +0000

I suppose they could weigh out what they are saving with cheapo manufacturing against what it costs to lose the countries that crack down on it. Just like auto makers do with the recalls; how much cost to admit the mistake and correct it compared to possible damage to their reputation and lawsuits if they do nothing.

But not too many global businesses can afford to write off 25% of their sales. Maybe if Europe does start to demand more generics Teva would start believing in better quality control.

By: USA / toddcurl

USA / toddcurl — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:24:30 +0000

I definitely agree with you Pat. The problem is that Teva’s predominant market is the US, which I believe represents almost 3/4 of their profits. Given the corruption and inadequacies of our for-profit health-care system and the FDA (which is practically a subsidiary of the Pharmaceutical and Agro-business Industries), consumer dissatisfaction is of little concern. Unfortunately, I don’t think Teva really cares if they lose the EU market — or any other market outside of the US.

By: Canada / Pat Morin

Canada / Pat Morin — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:11:30 +0000

One thing about getting so large as a drug maker is that Teva does have a need now to stay in the good graces of nearly all governments. It can’t justify growing that big and then getting cut off of important markets where they’ve been found to be selling bad products. So even if they could keep selling in the United States with no problem, they would have internal pressure from shareholders to fix it if they got banned in Germany or UK or Japan or somewhere like that.

And word sent around the internet hurts them some also.

By: USA / Roy G

USA / Roy G — Sun, 16 May 2010 05:37:56 +0000

Welcome to Balkingpoints Todd – well done.

Seems it amounts to a dawning problem then of corner-cutting on generic pharma manufacturing, whereas they used to be reliably equivalent to the brand. (And what a marketing scheme it sets up in turn for the Merck’s and Pfizer’s – uhm, “We’re the safe guys”…)

And yet another reason, why health care left to free markets is a very bad idea. Remedy here obviously requires the drug regulatory body of each nation to conduct spot checks on the quality of these generics, and you need an honest agency for that.

Just yesterday Obama went off on the “cozy” relationship between bureaucrats at Interior and Energy and offshore drillers. It’s no revelation that you can’t load these departments with industry shills. Progressives knew it was coming before Bush even took the office (he stole) in 2000. We had seen enough already under Reagan/Bush I.

But now we can legitimately fault Obama & staff for clear inertia, on badly needed house cleaning. Before the BP (not B/P… ;^) disaster, we had a carbon copy of the same problem, with the coal mine disaster at the Massey mine in West Virginia. Wholly inadequate oversight before the fact.

16 months in, these GOP-minted lapses are on Obama now.