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Comment by jusonchan81 | Hacker News Reader

If a company succeeds in eliminating or reducing a major illness (and its related family of illnesses) from world wide population then they should be rewarded with a one time cash bonus of what that illness could have cost the governments around the world for the next decade or so. Or some sort of formula like that.

One time incentives are always super attractive for employees and staff, although not so much for investors.

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Yes which is a very good reason that medicine should be a public good as it in Canada and many European countries. The whole premise of for-profit medicine as this article points out is insane.

Yes, European publicly funded medicine works great when R&D is funded by private sector sales to USA consumers. You're welcome!

That's kind of the point of prices. One major factor you consider when setting a price is what's the alternative. If the alternative is 10 years of treatment at $x a year, then you can charge up to 10 * x. You can charge more for convenience of not having to do treatment maybe less to entice this as an alternative

On the flip side, however, I imagine it's a lot harder to convince some entity -- an individual, an insurer, a government -- to pay $1 million once vs. $100,000/year for 10 (or more) years. Whether due to psychology (the former might feel more expensive) or budgeting (the latter lets you spread out the cost), the problem remains. It's going to take a non-trivial amount of effort I think to get the American (and possibly other) healthcare system(s) ready for such a change.

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