In real life, Goldman-Sachs has apparently come to the same conclusion as PharmaKom, saying that cures to disease might not be economically viable
.
That said, PharmaKom would be able to make a lot more money from ongoing treatment medications, if they could cost consumers a lot less than "two grand per clinical unit" (or a standard dose).
Just as Disney/Marvel can make a killing getting millions of people to pay $15 to watch an Avengers flick, PharmaKom could easily make hundreds of billions of dollars selling NAS treatments to more than half of the entire world at a low, low, ridiculously low markup, but if they have to demand people fork over $2K-a-pop for their medicines, then they've priced out nearly all their consumers, which would make an outright cure (that PharmaKom already would have had) much more economically viable by comparison.
EDIT: A better Real Life case to consider when drawing comparisons to PharmaKom would be Martin Shkreli's antics in inflating the price of the AIDS treatment drug Daraprim from $13.50-per-pill to $750 (56x the drug's original cost). Such actions and high prices not only sparked widespread public outrage and immense negative publicity for Shkreli and his company Turing Pharmaceuticals but also encouraged rival drugs manufacturers to offer their own AIDS treatment drugs at vastly lower prices ($1-per-pill).
Edited by SeanMurrayI
Yet all that outrage over the price hike didn't change a thing, in the U.S. Daraprim is still $750 a pill and its' closest competitor stateside is selling for a dollar a pill while every other country that produces the drug sells for cents.
Consumers who need AIDS drugs don't have to depend on Turing Pharmaceuticals' product if their closest competitors are selling similar medicines at prices more than 750x lower than their own product, and the companies that sell the cheaper drugs stand to make vastly more money from more consumers who can afford their lower prices.
Simple math: If half the people in the entire world each gave a corporation just $1, that would already amount to over $3.6 billion. Now, in a world much like Johnny Mnemonic, where half the planet is suffering from a deadly, debilitating plague, if a pharmaceutical company would offer plague victims an absurdly low $1-per-day treatment regimen that most anybody could afford, that company could stand to earn well over $1.3 trillion in a year—undoubtedly an immense profit for any company, even after paying back production costs, taxes, and other expenses.
However, when pricing much needed, highly demanded drug treatments at $750-per-pill or $2,000-per-dose, beyond the ease and simplicity of making a corporation appear absurdly greedy and evil in the context of a movie narrative for artistic sake, such prices in more realistic contexts make a product completely unaffordable to the vast majority of people who would seek to buy it and, therefore, not anywhere near as profitable. To paraphrase a piece of that Goldman-Sachs analysis, PharmaKom would be demanding billions of plague sufferers to each pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars (possibly even surpassing well over a million dollars) every year for their treatments, even when many more consumers could more plausibly afford to scrape together as much as tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Edited by SeanMurrayI
Is there anything substantive in the film to back up earlier claims made of a Gainax Ending in this movie? This explanation doesn't seem to actually clarify any of the glaring flaws throughout the narrative and would still suggest the presence of one or more plot holes.
EDIT: Also, Johnny's AI mother couldn't have possibly "given" Johnny back his memories as she was already seen dying ("burned" out of the PharmaKom computer mainframe) prior to Johnny unlocking the three-image download code.
Edited by SeanMurrayI
Actually, Pharma Kom full name (Pharma Kombinat Industrie Gmb H) is German. It translates like "Pharmacological Combine LTD" Made sensem as it was founded in Swiss.
Recent edits referred to a "missing scene" occurring at some point during Shinji and his mooks' trek to the defectors' hotel room. As far as I know, all unused scenes in the American release were restored in the Japanese cut, and the Japanese cut does not include any such scene. If such a deleted scene does exist, I'd like to ask for more information about what exactly transpires in the clip that explains the otherwise outlined continuity gaffs.
Edited by 173.2.20.80
Aris Boch
Where'd you got that Anna Kalmann is Johnny's mom? It sounds cool, but I can't remember it from thie film.
If you do drugs... Don't to roshnah!! Hide / Show Replies
Johnny's childhood memories which return to him at the end of the movie include an explicit shot of his mother smiling down on him, and it's heavily implied to have been the Electronic Ghost Woman.
Thx, I took a look at the standard DVD version and saw, that the face Johnny sees in his childhood memory-fragments more or less matches that of Anna Kalmann.
If you do drugs... Don't to roshnah!!
Page was moved over to the Film namespace. Original discussion page for Main.JohnnyMnemonic may be found here.
A recent edit responding to Artistic License – Economics:
A couple of key points, if the written explanation isn't already thorough enough:
- The extraordinarily expensive treatments PharmaKom is said to put out for NAS already far exceed the prices of "comparably" expensive treatments in the American healthcare system in Real Life. As an older rebuttal, below, claims its "plausible" or more profitable for many patients to pay as much as "tens of thousands" of dollars to treat incurable illness or health conditions, that's already far less than the sheer millions of dollars that PharmaKom would be demanding people shell out in less than two years just for medications alone (nevermind additional costs for hospital or emergency room visits or appointments/tests ordered by doctors or specialists).
- Extremely high prices stretching into the millions of dollars per patient are still outright impossible for the wide majority of infected people (50% of the entire global population) to afford in order for these drugs to truly be "profitable," and even both nationalized and privatized healthcare systems would not be able to mitigate the burden of these ridiculous costs for such a widespread pandemic. The massive numbers of people on insurance plans seeking healthcare for NAS would already accumulate total costs over several hundred billion dollars in just a matter of weeks (possibly even several trillion dollars, depending on how many thousands or millions of people could be seeking coverage in any given insurance pool), which no insurance model could possibly afford to help cover to any significant degree, which would still saddle 50% of the entire planet with ludicrously unaffordable costs for care to pay "out of pocket."
- These expensive drugs still don't keep people alive long enough to ceaselessly funnel all their money to PharmaKom and maintain their apparent "profitability" even In-Universe. Takahashi's daughter succumbed to NAS in a very short period of time without their medicines significantly extending her lifespan, and throwaway exposition only heard in the "Japanese Edit" suggests the same available medicines are outright toxic and killing off NAS patients, anyway.
Edited by SeanMurrayI