111–120 of 461 posts
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I'm not much familiar with the system in the US, but I got the impression that the state already subsidises a large amount of the research anyway?
Big pharma/biotech spends about 2x what the NIH spends on research. And that doesn't include the tens of billions in biotech VC funding.
Drug creation needs to be nationalized, 100% tax funded all the way from researcher to trials to manufacture, and the drugs sold at cost thereafter. And the pharmaceuticals industry needs to just go away.
I want my goverment helping people avoid health issues, rather than subsidising costs that could have been prevented. I've yet to see any one industry that has been nationalised and is performing better (in every sense) than the private sector.
A good example of a market which works well almost without intervention could be the coffee market, since it's really difficult to have a monopoly on any side (farming, distribution, selling) and the incentive is aligned with the customer's best interest (selling coffee to get more money). A lot of physical consumer goods are in this category.
In between, you have markets with a high cost infrastructure but where the main goal is to be a public good. These market need constant input because their interest is not entirely aligned with the consumer. ISPs can be a good example of this, if you don't put laws to correct the default behaviour, it will never work well. But with good laws, it's fixable.
At the opposite end I suspect there is markets where the private system will never work, whatever laws you put in place. Education, Health related industries, Prison and Justice system would fall in this category. There will be no law strong enough to change their incentive so it's aligned with the public.
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Do you really want Congress arguing over which drug research to fund?
Why would Congress be micromanaging it? They don't do that for NASA.
The SLS program is jokingly called the Senate Launch System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
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The same greed makes the drug industry to develop drugs which treat the illness rather than cure it. Regular drug users are much better for them than one-time users.
This is an absolutely ridiculous statement. Last year Gilead sold a drug that cures hepatitis C. Cures! The error in your thinking is that curing a patient results in less money than just chronically treating one. Not so!
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It's really shocking to such an anti-technological development comment on site about technological development. If the federal government had locked down all IT development in the 1980s as you proposing they do for pharmaceuticals, we wouldn't have this forum to comment on, much less the industry it is built around.
It really isn't comparable. Computers are tools. Drugs are health. They are a public good and a natural human right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Mixing them up like the USA system does is a category error.
I'm a libertarian and completely in favor of private property and an open, informed marketplace. Having said that, this is out of control. If you know you're selling me a life-or-death product which has no peer, and the government protects your property such that others can't make it cheaper? It's not a market. It's rent-seeking, highway robbery. Bad actors are going to cause an overreaction that is going to seriousl…
How is this libertarian? This is the exact opposite.
Without the FDA other companies could easily produce this product, it's out of patient but the claim is they are using government regulation to slow competition down.
The exact opposite to libertarian.
The guy is simply hilarious. Looks pretty innocent from the profile picture though.
It looks like the real world version of Krang [1]. This is simply astonishing.
Drug creation needs to be nationalized, 100% tax funded all the way from researcher to trials to manufacture, and the drugs sold at cost thereafter. And the pharmaceuticals industry needs to just go away.
The drugs might end up being cheaper, but there will be much less research for drugs (aka less drugs in the future). Greed is a good motivator.
Greed in here can also be a cause for the tragedy of the commons, which is more serious than any opportunity progress! Because of the said greed the drugs reached agriculture having all kinds of unintended effects, the most serious of which being development of many drug-resistant pathogens.
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I don't think you understood my comment. "Socialised healthcare" is a system where a public institution puts capital to take care of a patient by using private-made products and services. i.e. the needles, IT systems, ambulances, drugs, etc, the public system is a platform, but not an industry. Let the market be free, private companies are better at solving real problems. If the price of a drug is expensive (i) a pub…
Loads of things have been handed over from the government to companies within The Netherlands. Your general statement that governments are not good I highly doubt. Especially for basic services, governments seem to run them cheaper and more reliably.