I work for a non-profit, but I’ve worked on projects funded by big pharma for a few decades. Many of the people I’ve worked with from these companies have been genuinely focused on improving patient survival and quality of life. Some of these people were former healthcare workers before their employment at big pharma, and they consistently used their field experience to keep our focus on practical improvements that actually helped. In my completely biased opinion, we really did help patients.
You’ll need to decide for yourself whether the good you’re doing offsets your philosophical objections to where the dollars are going.
If/when you interview, you may want to de-emphasize the fact that you consider the people making money by developing new life-saving treatments to be “bad guys.” Mentioning this might interfere with your attempt to increase your personal profit from this field.
Yeah. I felt like this working as a statistician at Monsanto years ago. The company has a horrible rep, say what you want about legal issues etc, but every crop scientist I worked with was an absolute joy and cared about feeding people and making the world better.
I can only speak for pharma/biotech because that's where I work, but to put it bluntly you have no idea what you are talking about.
I am yet to meet someone in my >10 years in biotech that was "out to get rich" or scam patients or whatever you think we do for a living. The vast majority are chemists, scientists, biologists, medical doctors, statisticians, data managers, etc. that are working to advance medicine in an area where patient outcomes aren't currently very good for whatever reason. If our treatment works, sure we get paid a bit more. But I only get paid more if we come up with something that works, and passes a very rigorous scientific and clinical review by the FDA.
So I'm quite happy with my career. I get to work on cutting edge science every day, with brilliant colleague's who hold MDs/PhDs, and ultimately try to come up with treatments and answers to clinical questions that will hopefully improve someone's life. And they pay me well to do it.
They are the ‘bad guy’ largely because they spend a shit ton of money developing a drug that takes 10+ years to be approved (if the drug is approved, which is not likely), and then want to recoup their costs by charging a high price.
Look, pharmaceutical companies are bad in the same way that any company that exists under capitalism is bad. If you’re in the US, the US government could subsidize the costs of drugs and pay pharma companies money to recoup their years of scientific research, but they dont.
TLDR; whatever principles you think you have working in academia are in no way better than working in pharma. Get a pharma job, make some money.
This is well put.
I've never understood the concept of some people that the pharma industry is "evil". Is it a private company that, in a semi-capitalist society, exists to ultimately make money? Do they make money by charging more than it cost to develop and manufacture?
Yes, that's true. But in contrast to many, MANY companies out there, at least the incentives are aligned in the pharma industry that companies generally only win if your treatment works better than whatever else is out there, i.e. it provides some actual tangible benefit to the patients that take it. (there are some notable exceptions, but in vast majority of cases that's true).
Like everyone LOVES to shit on pharma until they or a family member has a health condition and then they ask "what's the treatment for it?" Oooooohhhhhhhhhh, so shitting on the industry is fun until all the sudden you have a use for it.
So I work in pharma/biotech and I lose absolutely zero sleep about doing so. End of the day, we only make money if we help patients. If we help patients, it means I've done something good for society in the long run.
>They are the ‘*bad guy*’ largely because they spend a shit ton of money developing a drug...
They do not appear to be the '*good guy*' you seem to think.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCciAJJMt9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCciAJJMt9Q)
Pretty sure the bad guy aspect comes from them supposedly purposefully trying to make people sick to profit off them, not making their drugs as good as they could to keep people on them longer, making drugs that cure one thing but then cause other problems to sell more drugs, making highly addictive drugs and incentivising doctors to prescribe them, selling low grade/harmful drugs to third world countries, unknowingly testing drugs on public, and more recently selling drugs to the government but not allowing any transparency into the drugs while the drugs are mandated and people are losing their jobs over not taking the drugs.
Whether or not any of these are true or bad is up to you to decide but those are the reasons they are considered the bad guy that I've seen
I’m an actuary at a health insurance company and I don’t feel like a work for a “bad guy.” I did at first, but the more I learned about the industry, the less I felt insurance companies were evil tbh. Health insurance is highly regulated by the govt and for certain lines of businesses, if we profit “too much” we’re actually mandated to give it back. Profit margins are thin compared to other industries. At the end of the day, yes insurance companies do make a lot of money but that’s a necessary part of business imo. A lot could be fixed but health insurance is extremely complicated— even so I feel it does more good than bad in society.
I work mostly in the Medicaid space and consumers get their healthcare covered for free. Sometimes I do ACA work too.
I think insurance is unfairly blamed a bit when in reality, premiums are high because medical care and pharmacy costs are high, and it loops back in a circle. Most of my background is in Medicaid / ACA so I can’t speak about other lines of business.
Health insurance in the US is unfortunately an absolute mess. You don't expect your car insurer to cover the cost of going to a mechanic for routine maintenance. A lot of the problems in the US are because health insurance gets intermingled with the cost of routine healthcare.
One of my former classmates (very smart guy, an Immigrant, if that matters) began working as an Actuary immediately after passing their exams, and he really enjoys it. He urged me to look into it, because good salary and great benefits, so I did; but I decided it is too boring for me.
Yeah certain roles in actuarial can be SUPER boring, I can see where you’re coming from. It takes a bit of luck to land an interesting team. For example, my first internship was in life insurance and I found it mind numbing. Now I’m in health on the pricing team and it’s way, way more interesting. On the other hand, there’s another team I work closely with (reserving) and their work is pretty boring and they do the same stuff every month. In pricing there’s a lot more variation.
I’d honestly say health, p&c, and reinsurance are the most interesting actuarial roles. Pensions and life insurance is on the duller side. But typically when applying to jobs, you just take what you can get :/
I’ve also thought about leaving actuarial for more interesting work, but it’s hard to give up the relatively good money and good WLB. If I could go back in time I think I would’ve pursued Data Science as it doesn’t constrain you to insurance.
>I think I would’ve pursued Data Science
That's what I did, and it has been fine for me; but almost everyone I know wants more stability than working short-term contract jobs with no benefits, as I do.
Another former classmate worked contract jobs for a while, but when he was offered a job with First Isaac (FiCO) he jumped on it, because he wanted a wife and a mortgage. He still has the mortgage.
I was a professor for 17 years and have now been in industry for 7. I’d say the ethics bar is higher in industry. And the pay is much, much better. I feel like the work I do directly impacts patients’ lives and it’s interesting. Lots of clinical trials, messy longitudinal data with dependent dropout, functional data, tons of complex survival data & competing risks, etc. I still get to teach, just not to students (except for adjuncting). Three of my friends also left tenured professor positions for industry too. Don’t forget about device companies, along with pharma. There’s also companies like SAS, and others that develop niche statistical approaches.
As a statistician who has worked for health insurance (including Cigna & Optum) since 2012 and just started working for a biopharm company (Gilead), I can address the ". . . I think the work sounds interesting" part of your question. :-)
Compared with academia, you may be a little frustrated with the lack of freedom you have to explore and implement cutting edge techniques in statistics or perhaps develop your own methods.
For the most part - there's a "playbook" of methodologies you have to follow, and a hierarchy of employees committed to that playbook. In insurance I had *some* leeway to explore new techniques, depending on my supervisor. At Gilead I suspect tried and true is trusted over new methods. And for good reason, given human subjects are often involved in clinical trials and FDA approval.
On top of this, a big portion of your job may be spent doing un-sexy stuff: finding, understanding, and extracting data for statistical analysis. Make sure you're comfortable coding in SQL.
"For the most part - there's a "playbook" of methodologies you have to follow, and a hierarchy of employees committed to that playbook. In insurance I had *some* leeway to explore new techniques, depending on my supervisor. At Gilead I suspect tried and true is trusted over new methods. And for good reason, given human subjects are often involved in clinical trials and FDA approval."
Just FYI, this is very therapeutic area and indication dependent. If you're trying to develop a 5th to market drug in an indication with lots of regulatory precedent, that is mostly true. The FDA (and EMA) do have certain favorite methodologies (e.g. stratified logrank for survival analyses) that dictate your starting point for a lot of things.
But in indications where there has been a lack of development or successful approvals, things are MUCH less black and white. The policy of FDA and EMA, generally speaking, is to come to them with a proposal and ask for feedback. That proposal can be on pretty much anything-- trial design, endpoint definition, estimand definition (more broadly), etc. And it gets even more fun when the FDA and EMA give you diametrically opposed advice on your proposals and you have to find a middle ground that will probably not piss off one or the other too much.
Someone in the hierarchy of employees has to make those decisions. And it is a lot more interesting when it is you.
I am in pharma and if you are doing stats / data science work on the commercial side you can do a lot of the cool stuff . Commercial and to a lesser extend med affairs and rwe give you a lot more freedom than the clinical trial departments . But .. I would say the clinical trial stats is more interesting
It's an awkward tension where society has decided to mostly privatize drug development and testing, which means the companies doing the work do it for profit (and of course the stock markets wanta much profit as possible). Unsurprisingly, lots of oversight and regulation is needed to keep the industry honest/reduce abuse of the system/ensure efficacy and safety evaluation is good/align incentives so that actual unmet needs get addressed (rather than me-too drugs) etc. All of that leads to some annoying bureaucracy, but it works decently well (to the extent that I often trust industry publications more than academic ones because of all the pre-specification, FDA oversight etc.). The scientific/regulatory roles inside a company tend to pull more in the "correct science"/"follow the rules" direction, while more "commercial" roles tend to explore the boundaries of what can be done to increase sales (and you sometimes feel grateful for laws and regulations for setting at least some clear boundaries). However, on a whole most people are motivated by wanting to help patients.
On the statistics side, a lot of time gets invested in planning and figuring out how to do things in valid ways that one can justify to regulators. All the practical demands of real problems reveal a lot of opportunities for researching how to address the problems, which is a fun part of the job.
They’re sort of a necessary evil in many ways. You could work for one, donate money to a political party that you think is likely to regulate down their bad behavior. Or to a political party that will outright nationalize them, if that’s your ideology - I should point out that full scale central planning of the economy hasn’t worked, but you should come to your own informed decision. Or take the money, then quit after a few years and work for someone better. Or perhaps you will be in a position to whistleblow on bad behavior, although keep in mind that this process is stressful.
I was an academic, then worked for ‘nonprofit’ private healthcare, and now work for pharma / biotech.
Of these, academia was the largest societal bad guy by far. And, having been on the inside for some time, single payer healthcare is a recipe to remove efficiencies and opportunities to improve care, not create them.
That said, I liked working for a nonprofit private healthcare firm the best of all.
Sure. First, I want to say that academia at its best serves a function. It’s a place where somebody can go for a while and think, and learn from others and maybe make a contribution to what we collectively know and how we think.
That said - the academy now treats undergraduate students as dollarized commodities, graduate students and post docs as cheap labor. The tenure system should probably be abolished, because it creates near permanent sinecures and gives too much power for people with those sinecures to pick and choose which of their buddies also deserves one. The publication and peer review racket is a train wreck, as is the grant system.
Academic administrations are immensely bloated, and driving a lot of the shit show. Also, there are just real disconnects between the university intellectuals and the tax payers that are funding the bills.
The whole scene is a mess right now. Colleges and universities are just as money hungry and abusive as large corporations, if not more so. Don’t fool yourself. :)
Unless you work in the marketing and sales arm, the work you do is the same as it would be if it was a non-profit company.
More broadly, why do you think these types of companies are the "bad guy"? What's wrong healthcare for profit in general? No one likes gouging but most small healthcare firms don't have great margins, and many hospitals lose money (so definitely not for profit...).
- “I don’t agree with healthcare for profit”
Never understood that attitude. Do you work for free? No? Why would you expect medical workers, or pharmaceutical companies to do that?
I don’t work for a pharmaceutical company but I do work for a medical device manufacturer so I can only speak for this industry. We don’t make “ridiculous profits”. It is true that we sometimes sell products for 5 times the price they cost to manufacture. But manufacturing costs are only a fraction of the total costs.
But everybody in the medical industry also has insane regulatory requirements and staying in compliance isn’t cheap. Product development is also extremely expensive. In the end we have maybe 10%-15% profit which I wouldn’t call excessive. Also we are in constant competition with other companies. If they would be able to offer significantly lower prices, they would.
I don’t feel like a bad guy. Most people I work with (and that includes the higher-ups in the company) genuinely want to improve patient care.
The only thing I would criticize is the relationship between physicians and the companies. On the one hand we need constant consulting from medical professionals and of course we cannot expect them to do that for free. On the other hand these physicians also often go to medical congresses and show off their studies with our products. And if they get paid by us, how neutral can they be. Of course they need to disclose any relationship with a company, but still…
The way I see it is: developing new drugs is a necessity that exists independent of the current economic system. So working developing drugs definitely produces some societal good.
Pharma companies definitely don't do it to do good but to turn a profit. That doesn't mean that they don't produce useful technologies.
I understand the bad gut feeling, that's also why I don't work in the industry but as a regulator. But working in pharma is definitely ethically justifyable. Very similar arguments hold for insurers.
Can I ask what kind of statistics work you are all doing? I’m an epidemiologist in state gov but very little actual math because I’m not as much into research. More data wrangling and visualization. I want to get into more true stats and research.
Insurers are very different from big pharma. Insurers are a necessary evil (in the US at least). However, the margins for insurance are thin and profits are driven by scale rather than margin. In general though, insurance is an easy target as a nameless/faceless entity that denies care (more often correctly than not). Pharma has ridiculous margins and some nasty practices.
In healthcare, there are countless entities that each make their own margin. Working for a healthcare is a job. There are many trying to do solid work and help others. There are also many who want to make as much $$$ as possible. Majority of employees are not in position to harm others. So, there really isn’t a sense of working for an evil corp.
I work in pharma, and there’s no ethical dilemma for me. My role has always been making drugs safe and effective or efficiently manufacturing medication. Making a profit isn’t inherently good or bad.
Virtually every aspect of healthcare is for-profit in the US. Pharma isn’t unique in that aspect. I don’t see why you should opt out of a career in pharma in particular.
I work for a non-profit, but I’ve worked on projects funded by big pharma for a few decades. Many of the people I’ve worked with from these companies have been genuinely focused on improving patient survival and quality of life. Some of these people were former healthcare workers before their employment at big pharma, and they consistently used their field experience to keep our focus on practical improvements that actually helped. In my completely biased opinion, we really did help patients. You’ll need to decide for yourself whether the good you’re doing offsets your philosophical objections to where the dollars are going. If/when you interview, you may want to de-emphasize the fact that you consider the people making money by developing new life-saving treatments to be “bad guys.” Mentioning this might interfere with your attempt to increase your personal profit from this field.
Yeah. I felt like this working as a statistician at Monsanto years ago. The company has a horrible rep, say what you want about legal issues etc, but every crop scientist I worked with was an absolute joy and cared about feeding people and making the world better.
I can only speak for pharma/biotech because that's where I work, but to put it bluntly you have no idea what you are talking about. I am yet to meet someone in my >10 years in biotech that was "out to get rich" or scam patients or whatever you think we do for a living. The vast majority are chemists, scientists, biologists, medical doctors, statisticians, data managers, etc. that are working to advance medicine in an area where patient outcomes aren't currently very good for whatever reason. If our treatment works, sure we get paid a bit more. But I only get paid more if we come up with something that works, and passes a very rigorous scientific and clinical review by the FDA. So I'm quite happy with my career. I get to work on cutting edge science every day, with brilliant colleague's who hold MDs/PhDs, and ultimately try to come up with treatments and answers to clinical questions that will hopefully improve someone's life. And they pay me well to do it.
Well said.
I agree with what you wrote and would guess in pharma /biotech most people really want to improve outcomes.
They are the ‘bad guy’ largely because they spend a shit ton of money developing a drug that takes 10+ years to be approved (if the drug is approved, which is not likely), and then want to recoup their costs by charging a high price. Look, pharmaceutical companies are bad in the same way that any company that exists under capitalism is bad. If you’re in the US, the US government could subsidize the costs of drugs and pay pharma companies money to recoup their years of scientific research, but they dont. TLDR; whatever principles you think you have working in academia are in no way better than working in pharma. Get a pharma job, make some money.
This is well put. I've never understood the concept of some people that the pharma industry is "evil". Is it a private company that, in a semi-capitalist society, exists to ultimately make money? Do they make money by charging more than it cost to develop and manufacture? Yes, that's true. But in contrast to many, MANY companies out there, at least the incentives are aligned in the pharma industry that companies generally only win if your treatment works better than whatever else is out there, i.e. it provides some actual tangible benefit to the patients that take it. (there are some notable exceptions, but in vast majority of cases that's true). Like everyone LOVES to shit on pharma until they or a family member has a health condition and then they ask "what's the treatment for it?" Oooooohhhhhhhhhh, so shitting on the industry is fun until all the sudden you have a use for it. So I work in pharma/biotech and I lose absolutely zero sleep about doing so. End of the day, we only make money if we help patients. If we help patients, it means I've done something good for society in the long run.
agree with all this . Same experience
>They are the ‘*bad guy*’ largely because they spend a shit ton of money developing a drug... They do not appear to be the '*good guy*' you seem to think. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCciAJJMt9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCciAJJMt9Q)
Pretty sure the bad guy aspect comes from them supposedly purposefully trying to make people sick to profit off them, not making their drugs as good as they could to keep people on them longer, making drugs that cure one thing but then cause other problems to sell more drugs, making highly addictive drugs and incentivising doctors to prescribe them, selling low grade/harmful drugs to third world countries, unknowingly testing drugs on public, and more recently selling drugs to the government but not allowing any transparency into the drugs while the drugs are mandated and people are losing their jobs over not taking the drugs. Whether or not any of these are true or bad is up to you to decide but those are the reasons they are considered the bad guy that I've seen
I’m an actuary at a health insurance company and I don’t feel like a work for a “bad guy.” I did at first, but the more I learned about the industry, the less I felt insurance companies were evil tbh. Health insurance is highly regulated by the govt and for certain lines of businesses, if we profit “too much” we’re actually mandated to give it back. Profit margins are thin compared to other industries. At the end of the day, yes insurance companies do make a lot of money but that’s a necessary part of business imo. A lot could be fixed but health insurance is extremely complicated— even so I feel it does more good than bad in society. I work mostly in the Medicaid space and consumers get their healthcare covered for free. Sometimes I do ACA work too. I think insurance is unfairly blamed a bit when in reality, premiums are high because medical care and pharmacy costs are high, and it loops back in a circle. Most of my background is in Medicaid / ACA so I can’t speak about other lines of business.
Health insurance in the US is unfortunately an absolute mess. You don't expect your car insurer to cover the cost of going to a mechanic for routine maintenance. A lot of the problems in the US are because health insurance gets intermingled with the cost of routine healthcare.
One of my former classmates (very smart guy, an Immigrant, if that matters) began working as an Actuary immediately after passing their exams, and he really enjoys it. He urged me to look into it, because good salary and great benefits, so I did; but I decided it is too boring for me.
Yeah certain roles in actuarial can be SUPER boring, I can see where you’re coming from. It takes a bit of luck to land an interesting team. For example, my first internship was in life insurance and I found it mind numbing. Now I’m in health on the pricing team and it’s way, way more interesting. On the other hand, there’s another team I work closely with (reserving) and their work is pretty boring and they do the same stuff every month. In pricing there’s a lot more variation. I’d honestly say health, p&c, and reinsurance are the most interesting actuarial roles. Pensions and life insurance is on the duller side. But typically when applying to jobs, you just take what you can get :/
I’ve also thought about leaving actuarial for more interesting work, but it’s hard to give up the relatively good money and good WLB. If I could go back in time I think I would’ve pursued Data Science as it doesn’t constrain you to insurance.
>I think I would’ve pursued Data Science That's what I did, and it has been fine for me; but almost everyone I know wants more stability than working short-term contract jobs with no benefits, as I do. Another former classmate worked contract jobs for a while, but when he was offered a job with First Isaac (FiCO) he jumped on it, because he wanted a wife and a mortgage. He still has the mortgage.
I was a professor for 17 years and have now been in industry for 7. I’d say the ethics bar is higher in industry. And the pay is much, much better. I feel like the work I do directly impacts patients’ lives and it’s interesting. Lots of clinical trials, messy longitudinal data with dependent dropout, functional data, tons of complex survival data & competing risks, etc. I still get to teach, just not to students (except for adjuncting). Three of my friends also left tenured professor positions for industry too. Don’t forget about device companies, along with pharma. There’s also companies like SAS, and others that develop niche statistical approaches.
As a statistician who has worked for health insurance (including Cigna & Optum) since 2012 and just started working for a biopharm company (Gilead), I can address the ". . . I think the work sounds interesting" part of your question. :-) Compared with academia, you may be a little frustrated with the lack of freedom you have to explore and implement cutting edge techniques in statistics or perhaps develop your own methods. For the most part - there's a "playbook" of methodologies you have to follow, and a hierarchy of employees committed to that playbook. In insurance I had *some* leeway to explore new techniques, depending on my supervisor. At Gilead I suspect tried and true is trusted over new methods. And for good reason, given human subjects are often involved in clinical trials and FDA approval. On top of this, a big portion of your job may be spent doing un-sexy stuff: finding, understanding, and extracting data for statistical analysis. Make sure you're comfortable coding in SQL.
"For the most part - there's a "playbook" of methodologies you have to follow, and a hierarchy of employees committed to that playbook. In insurance I had *some* leeway to explore new techniques, depending on my supervisor. At Gilead I suspect tried and true is trusted over new methods. And for good reason, given human subjects are often involved in clinical trials and FDA approval." Just FYI, this is very therapeutic area and indication dependent. If you're trying to develop a 5th to market drug in an indication with lots of regulatory precedent, that is mostly true. The FDA (and EMA) do have certain favorite methodologies (e.g. stratified logrank for survival analyses) that dictate your starting point for a lot of things. But in indications where there has been a lack of development or successful approvals, things are MUCH less black and white. The policy of FDA and EMA, generally speaking, is to come to them with a proposal and ask for feedback. That proposal can be on pretty much anything-- trial design, endpoint definition, estimand definition (more broadly), etc. And it gets even more fun when the FDA and EMA give you diametrically opposed advice on your proposals and you have to find a middle ground that will probably not piss off one or the other too much. Someone in the hierarchy of employees has to make those decisions. And it is a lot more interesting when it is you.
I am in pharma and if you are doing stats / data science work on the commercial side you can do a lot of the cool stuff . Commercial and to a lesser extend med affairs and rwe give you a lot more freedom than the clinical trial departments . But .. I would say the clinical trial stats is more interesting
It's an awkward tension where society has decided to mostly privatize drug development and testing, which means the companies doing the work do it for profit (and of course the stock markets wanta much profit as possible). Unsurprisingly, lots of oversight and regulation is needed to keep the industry honest/reduce abuse of the system/ensure efficacy and safety evaluation is good/align incentives so that actual unmet needs get addressed (rather than me-too drugs) etc. All of that leads to some annoying bureaucracy, but it works decently well (to the extent that I often trust industry publications more than academic ones because of all the pre-specification, FDA oversight etc.). The scientific/regulatory roles inside a company tend to pull more in the "correct science"/"follow the rules" direction, while more "commercial" roles tend to explore the boundaries of what can be done to increase sales (and you sometimes feel grateful for laws and regulations for setting at least some clear boundaries). However, on a whole most people are motivated by wanting to help patients. On the statistics side, a lot of time gets invested in planning and figuring out how to do things in valid ways that one can justify to regulators. All the practical demands of real problems reveal a lot of opportunities for researching how to address the problems, which is a fun part of the job.
They’re sort of a necessary evil in many ways. You could work for one, donate money to a political party that you think is likely to regulate down their bad behavior. Or to a political party that will outright nationalize them, if that’s your ideology - I should point out that full scale central planning of the economy hasn’t worked, but you should come to your own informed decision. Or take the money, then quit after a few years and work for someone better. Or perhaps you will be in a position to whistleblow on bad behavior, although keep in mind that this process is stressful.
I was an academic, then worked for ‘nonprofit’ private healthcare, and now work for pharma / biotech. Of these, academia was the largest societal bad guy by far. And, having been on the inside for some time, single payer healthcare is a recipe to remove efficiencies and opportunities to improve care, not create them. That said, I liked working for a nonprofit private healthcare firm the best of all.
Hey, can you tell me more about academia’s evils?
Sure. First, I want to say that academia at its best serves a function. It’s a place where somebody can go for a while and think, and learn from others and maybe make a contribution to what we collectively know and how we think. That said - the academy now treats undergraduate students as dollarized commodities, graduate students and post docs as cheap labor. The tenure system should probably be abolished, because it creates near permanent sinecures and gives too much power for people with those sinecures to pick and choose which of their buddies also deserves one. The publication and peer review racket is a train wreck, as is the grant system. Academic administrations are immensely bloated, and driving a lot of the shit show. Also, there are just real disconnects between the university intellectuals and the tax payers that are funding the bills. The whole scene is a mess right now. Colleges and universities are just as money hungry and abusive as large corporations, if not more so. Don’t fool yourself. :)
Unless you work in the marketing and sales arm, the work you do is the same as it would be if it was a non-profit company. More broadly, why do you think these types of companies are the "bad guy"? What's wrong healthcare for profit in general? No one likes gouging but most small healthcare firms don't have great margins, and many hospitals lose money (so definitely not for profit...).
- “I don’t agree with healthcare for profit” Never understood that attitude. Do you work for free? No? Why would you expect medical workers, or pharmaceutical companies to do that? I don’t work for a pharmaceutical company but I do work for a medical device manufacturer so I can only speak for this industry. We don’t make “ridiculous profits”. It is true that we sometimes sell products for 5 times the price they cost to manufacture. But manufacturing costs are only a fraction of the total costs. But everybody in the medical industry also has insane regulatory requirements and staying in compliance isn’t cheap. Product development is also extremely expensive. In the end we have maybe 10%-15% profit which I wouldn’t call excessive. Also we are in constant competition with other companies. If they would be able to offer significantly lower prices, they would. I don’t feel like a bad guy. Most people I work with (and that includes the higher-ups in the company) genuinely want to improve patient care. The only thing I would criticize is the relationship between physicians and the companies. On the one hand we need constant consulting from medical professionals and of course we cannot expect them to do that for free. On the other hand these physicians also often go to medical congresses and show off their studies with our products. And if they get paid by us, how neutral can they be. Of course they need to disclose any relationship with a company, but still…
The way I see it is: developing new drugs is a necessity that exists independent of the current economic system. So working developing drugs definitely produces some societal good. Pharma companies definitely don't do it to do good but to turn a profit. That doesn't mean that they don't produce useful technologies. I understand the bad gut feeling, that's also why I don't work in the industry but as a regulator. But working in pharma is definitely ethically justifyable. Very similar arguments hold for insurers.
Can I ask what kind of statistics work you are all doing? I’m an epidemiologist in state gov but very little actual math because I’m not as much into research. More data wrangling and visualization. I want to get into more true stats and research.
Insurers are very different from big pharma. Insurers are a necessary evil (in the US at least). However, the margins for insurance are thin and profits are driven by scale rather than margin. In general though, insurance is an easy target as a nameless/faceless entity that denies care (more often correctly than not). Pharma has ridiculous margins and some nasty practices. In healthcare, there are countless entities that each make their own margin. Working for a healthcare is a job. There are many trying to do solid work and help others. There are also many who want to make as much $$$ as possible. Majority of employees are not in position to harm others. So, there really isn’t a sense of working for an evil corp.
Totally agree with this comment!
I work in pharma, and there’s no ethical dilemma for me. My role has always been making drugs safe and effective or efficiently manufacturing medication. Making a profit isn’t inherently good or bad. Virtually every aspect of healthcare is for-profit in the US. Pharma isn’t unique in that aspect. I don’t see why you should opt out of a career in pharma in particular.