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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I agree that any price is too high if it simply doesn't work. I don't find the public funding critique particularly compelling because it is exactly what the public signed up for. The we fund private medical research and development because we want the more products brought to market by those firms. The reward is that the product exists at all.

I do think that there is a compelling argument for the the government trying to do more drug development and then licensing or open-sourcing the product.

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>The reward is that the product exists at all.

Why do VCs get any return from startups? Isn't the reward that the startup exists at all?

Better yet, why does Gilead get to write a press release explaining the reason they're asking $3k per person for the drug is so they can "invest in scientific innovation that might help generations to come"? Isn't the reward the money they initially got from the government?

I am getting pretty sick and tired of public money getting used – and rightly so – to fund innovate medical research, and then any and all benefits or profits from the results of that resesarch being privatized.

VCs get returns because they negotiate them upfront. I have never heard of a VC that donates money and then tries to go back and negotiate terms with the companies that IPO.

If you are tired of giving away public money, negotiate terms.

You’re talking about investment schemes operating several layers deep inside government bureaucracies. We should absolutely have legislation that mandates that public investment in drugs is returned to the public in kind, but it’s hand-waiving to pretend that the people on the receiving end of high drug prices should’ve negotiated better prices for themselves, or that drug companies wouldn’t throw everything they have to stop such measures being put in place.

>We should absolutely have legislation that mandates that public investment in drugs is returned to the public in kind

I don't think this more of a policy problem than a legislation policy. The US government can simply stop giving away free money at any point it wants.

>it’s hand-waiving to pretend that the people on the receiving end of high drug prices should’ve negotiated better prices for themselves

I think you may have missed the point I was making in my last post. I am not saying that drug consumers should negotiate better prices (although this is how prices are controlled in every other first world country). What I was saying that the US government intentionally gives away money with no strings attached for R&D. The explicit purpose of this funding is to help companies make products and profit. If the outcome you want is different, we need to look at different terms or a different investment vehicles.

One simple option would be requiring recipients of federal research grants to publish in open journals and open source their patents. the down side, is that this may reduce the chances of them being developed at all.

In addition to the US government, there are similar challenges for non-profits and charities, which often give money to large drug developers, or sell internally developed drugs to the for profit sector. You might find this paper interesting [1] as well as the history of ivacaftor.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20016689.2018.1...

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