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Comment by anthony_barker | Hacker News Reader

I would argue Big Pharma free rides its self on research from universities around the world which are mostly publicly funded and not for profit.

The US represents less than 34% of global research. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17354441/

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I'm sure they benefit from public research, lost of industries do, but even public Universities are perfectly capable of patenting their discoveries and getting paid by companies using them. Ours here in the UK certainly do this.

Patents are an attempt to protect risk. If you're getting my money to invest without any risk to yourself, you don't deserve a patent.

Here's an easy solution:

Patent and copyright times are limited proportionally by the percentage of government money invested and at the end of that time, the research must be made publicly available.

> The US represents less than 34% of global research

and yet, the US has about 5% of the world's population. So proportionally, they are punching way above their weight.

And 25% of the world's prison population. Do we want to keep this stats dump going or did you have a point?

It would be fairer to compare by wealth, where the USA is at 30.2%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...

if you use wealth, we are a back at why americans spend more on per captia than any other countries: because they can (because they are wealthier).

Healthcare, especially in older population, starts to behave like a luxury good at upper ends of cost / care.

US healthcare costs are similar to other developed countries once normalized by per capita GDP?

I thought they were still higher.

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