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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Food is far more important for human survival than medicine. Somehow we're able to allow a free market with for profit food producers and distributors. Lots of research is done to make better/heartier foods. Prices are quite reasonable for food with stable inflation. Almost no one thinks it'd be a good idea to nationalize food research, production and distribution. The solution seems clear to me: take a look at the relatively less important drug industry and change the regulations such that it operates more like the incredibly important food industry.

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This is a very disingenuous comparison. For any given food, there are a large number of both perfect and imperfect substitutes, which is very much not the cases for patented medicines. It is also much easier for individuals to grow their own food than it is to manufacture their own pharmaceuticals. But beyond that, food is one of the most regulated markets in modern society. Farm subsidies, food assistance programs like SNAP, strategic food reserves, and any number of other programs function as "soft" price controls. I don't think that "changing pharmaceutical regulations to match the food industry" means what you think it does.

Drug patents only last about 10 years. So fixing the evergreening system at the patent office solves your concern about perfect and imperfect substitutes.

Take a look some time at the large list of drugs Walmart pharmacy offers for just a few bucks a month. Our model should be to get more drugs in such a state that a Walmart can offer them for such a low price.

The market for food is not at all like the market for medicine. The main difference is that food is far more fungible than drugs are. If a patient is suffering an illness, there may be only one drug that will help, whereas if one needs calories, or vegetables, there are many more options.

Having said that, there is a reasonable argument to be made that the FDA and the patent situation stifles innovation and that most definitely should be looked at.

Off patent drugs are fungible in the sense that if Tylenol starts charging too much I can buy acetaminophen from anyone. Drug patents only last about 10 years. Fix evergreening at the patent office and your concerns are taken care of. Fixing evergreening is a much smaller action than cannibalizing an entire industry, which should be a last resort.

Makes sense to me. If evergreening is fixed, then theoretically in ten years time every drug on the market right now could be available as a generic at generic prices.

I think there's a lot of other great options on the table too. For example, we could form an international alliance with countries like Canada, Germany, UK, Japan... If a drug is legal/approved in one of those countries not only is it approved here automatically but we can also buy drugs from those countries.

We could further lower the barrier to entry for patients to get drugs by forcing the least dangerous varieties to be over the counter. For example, there's little reason an Albuterol inhaler requires a prescription. It's basically impossible to OD on and is not addictive.

Even if these specific ideas aren't the right solutions, I think we've been forced into a false dichotomy of basically the status quo or nationalization. I think we can be much more creative.

Hey since you seem to be familiar with the "evergreening" process, would you mind weighing in on my question above? [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22184942

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