Hacker News Reader

Comment by _lbaq | Hacker News Reader

Thats why "we the people" need to have large part in developing new drugs and the care of people, this is nothing that can be left to the "market" in some hope that it will "work out".

View on HN

Taxpayers already funds at least a third of drug research [1][2]. Plus the fundamental science research that makes more advanced drugs possible comes out of public universities.

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/who-funds-biomedical-research-266...

[2] https://other98.com/taxpayers-fund-pharma-research-developme...

You dont seem to be aware that public universities are already heavily involved in drug development. Looking at the facts is helpful before building a narrative.

I would rephrase that to "basic science that could lead to drug discovery".

Public universities can do some initial poking around, but are utterly incapable of actually developing a drug. They've tried and failed many times.

There is nothing to say the market won't solve problems. Innovations like Gilead's are inevitable. A cure might make less money than chronic treatment, but once a cure exists nobody is buying the treatment. It's rational to develop the cure if you want returns.

If your ultimate goal is sustainable profit, it would be rational to not even look for a cure at all.

As long as there is no practically usable permanent cure, everyone has a stable source of revenue from chronic treatment solutions.

Once anyone develops one, the chronic treatment would become significantly less attractive (as you say), so revenue would become less predictable for all parties, including the party that developed the cure.

> If your ultimate goal is sustainable profit, it would be rational to not even look for a cure at all.

If you have a monopoly.

It's enough if you already have a sustainable business selling chronic treatments. Which I think would be likely for the kind of companies that have enough resources to be able to research a permanent cure at all.

All possible pharmaceutical innovations are not "inevitable", at least not in any given time frame. It may be that pharma companies know which R&D approaches have a chance of producing a permanent cure, and which ones are more likely to result in a chronic treatment, and they focus their efforts on the former.

Yeah, no. You wouldn't have only 1 out of 100 drugs actually making it to market if companies knew which ones would work and which ones wouldn't.

Yet we have a ton of breakthrough drugs coming to market, most of which were created by private companies.

Good idea, but it takes a lot of cash.

So do many things not provided adequately by the market.

Once it is in the public hands, it allows for democratic prioritization of the cash (do we need more solar energy or more cures ?).

I like to think we need both

Although it might take less cash if only the people actually doing the research needed to get paid. If the patent lawyers, the investment bank analysts writing these reports, and the likes of Martin Shkreli also need to eat everyday that could potentially be inflating the cost.

And that's why God invented taxes. But then the US invented their own gods, who don't have to pay tax.

In many countries including mine, it is the state that pays into drugs companies anyway.

Depends what you mean. 'Cash' as in a 'fiduciary currency' is just a relative prioritization mechanism. 'We the People' should never be able to run out of 'cash' as we ca always just print more. In fact, 'we' have been doing this perpetually at high volume for some time. It is just that 'we' seem to prefer giving it away to select shareholders rather than to fund public beneficial goods or research.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com