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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Lets go further: nationalize drug companies. Do this to all the drugs.

Hear, hear! One can argue against this saying Capitalism is the panacea of the market, but one only needs to look at ANY OTHER FIRST WORLD NATION (99% of them have nationalized health care and pay less to get better care than us) to see that we're CLEARLY doing it wrong here.

I would be interested to see how the output of drug companies change after they are nationalised. Like would they focus on simple solutions that solve problems (rather than expensive solutions that hide problems)? And would they struggle at being yet another public service with a huge budget to be cut. Will their best staff move abroad for better salaries? Stuff like that.

I suspect surgery can give us some interesting insights here.

My understanding is that surgery research mostly takes place at university hospitals. I think that, outside medical devices, there isn't the same kind of non-practising science industry behind surgery research - it's all done by surgeons at research hospitals.

Research hospitals tend to be university hospitals and outside (and even inside) the US, university hospitals tend to be loosely government controlled.

So if we want to know what state controlled medical research could look like, I guess we just look to surgery.

Maybe someone more familiar with the biotech industry will comment, but it's my impression there have been some market success as well. Keeping that incentive to innovate is important.

Ha! Like they've been innovating in antibiotics for 40 years? In case folks have not been paying attention, zero innovation occurred there.

Currently its all about restless legs and secondary asthma relief and snake-oil mixtures of drugs rebranded under goofy names.

The drug companies have largely abdicated their responsibilities. For profit. What remains are money-making shells. Can't we just do without them? They are adding friction at this point.

Antibiotics do provide a good case for increased public research. I suspect medicine will always have parts that are done better publicly and others better in private hands.

For example, a tour guide in one poor country I visited mentioned that he knew guides that were trained doctors. Because good tour guides there make more money than doctors. Coincidentally, they also have a shortage of doctors. Kind of like America having a shortage of teachers when governments set the salary.

I think it would make more sense to simply have a government owned corporation who's sole purpose is to produce generic drugs on which the patent has expired.

The market for drugs like that generally functions quite well. Like a cash price of ~$5 a month well.

(The dustup over Martin Shkreli raising the price of Daraprim only happened because there were very few users of the drug)

Some drugs, like the cure for Hepatitis C, need to be available more widely before the patent runs out. It's a cure and only people that can come up with $84,000 dollars.

How about nationalizing all companies? Start with farmers since food is even more important than drugs. Make sure to throw away history books first.

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