Don't shut down the pharmacy of the developing world

We already have private and government financed pharma research. US alone spends around $26.4 billion each year, which do not include university founded research (that goes under education) and the other smaller incentive systems for pharma research by organizations such as FDA (which is a third recipient of government founds). Regardless, no drugs is provided at cost. Government founded research is also the primary ground work for which private pharma use, and private pharma would unlikely survive today without that core research being done for free.

But maybe government could be more return-on-investment friendly for the citizens who pay taxes and re-route some of that research founds into actually developing the end user drugs. At the same time they could create legal barriers for private pharma from using any tax funded pharma research. That would create some loud screams from the pharma lobby, and we would finally be able to say how valuable the patent supported pharma industry really is. I doubt however we will ever see such day, and patent supported pharma will continue to claim the glory while tax payers silently pays double for medicine. First through taxes and then a second time through the expensive drug prices in the pharmacy.

Does private pharma get to build on public research and then patent small changes? That's hardly fair.

>So pharma research can be yet another political weapon to control or wield against the other side? No thanks.

I'll take the mythical use of pharma research as a political weapon over the all too real Martin Shkreli phenomenon.

Because you naturally apply the American perspective only.

Governments have lots of money.

Even if a government research department was 20% less effective than an equivalent private sector research department (which I strongly doubt; they're probably equivalent), it would still be more cost effective. Pharma marketing budgets are titanic and that's an epic waste of money.

By "before" I meant the baldness-related research gets a lot more funding NOW, not that some sort of treatment was available historically, back when people were all a lot poorer:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bill-gates-...

“Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives,” he said at the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Global Grand Challenges Summit.

“The malaria vaccine in humanist terms is the biggest need, but it gets virtually no funding. If you are working on male baldness or other things you get an order of magnitude more research funding because of the voice in the marketplace than something like malaria.”

And if you think that is stupid, here is what others say:

Mr Gates’ complaint is echoed by the Global Forum for Health Research, which estimates that only 10 per cent of worldwide expenditure on health research is devoted to the problems that afflict 90 per cent of the world’s population – the so-called 10/90 gap. Malaria is estimated to have killed 660,000 people in 2010, most of them African children. About half of the world’s population is at risk. The transmission of the disease can be controlled by distributing cheap mosquito nets treated with insecticides. Research into a vaccine for the disease has so far failed to yield any results.

They could pay Microsoft to do the work too, then pay for licenses to use the software. Yet they (almost universally) choose not to, because the costs of even setting up such a deal are far too high.

Open source reduces transaction costs and it also reduces startup costs.

This article on the Motley Fool estimates around $3 billion total.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/30/the-cost-of...

Where does the money come from for any discoveries in any science where researchers can build freely on each other's results?

Also - read my link!

What? That's absurd. It's not a non-sequitur. It's a statement that massive government research projects are exceptionally overpriced and inefficient.

Maybe a sarcastic comment isn't the most effective means of communication. But given the quality of the root comment I felt it appropriate.

Here. Let me paste a blurb by Richard Posner from An Economic Analysis of Copyright Law. Copyright law is not the same as patent law, of course. But the balance being sought is much the same.

"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good" aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work, whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering copyright protection."

The internet being a result of DoD research doesn't make them impervious to criticism.