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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> The world is full of countries with more equally distributed healthcare systems than the US with better public/private balance. The one that gets brought up most often here is the UK NHS, but there are plenty of others.

How many countries with socialist health care systems then produce new drugs for patients? I can tell you, it's about none. Most of the new drugs worldwide come from the US market. There's no way going around that fact.

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Some major medicinal companies here in socialist Denmark are:

Novo -- focusing on diabetes; about 15,000 employees in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novo_Nordisk

Novozymes -- enzymes; about 6,500 employees in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novozymes

Coloplast -- colostomy bags etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloplast

Genmab -- cancer etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genmab

These are 4 directly medical companies that also are all 4 part of the OMX 20 stock market index (similar to NASDAQ 100, the most 20 valuable public companies). That index also has 2 hearing aid companies (GN and William Demant)

One source estimates 44.000 employees in biotech/medtech in the Copenhagen/Sweden "Medicon Valley" area.

So what are all these medical researchers in the EU doing? I have a suspicion that much of this stuff is fully international and it's the final steps of trial, patenting and bringing to market that happen in the US, causing research to be over-attributed to the US.

There's also the question of what kind of research is prioritised by the profit motive.

(Human Genome Project is probably the flagship example of such international public research)

Their research is only possible because they know they will be able to recoup costs in the US.

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