Ask HN: Why don’t governments offer bounties for pharma/medical device research? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don’t governments offer bounties for pharma/medical device research?

3 pointsbaron8162 comments

It’s not that hard to figure out what kind of illnesses impact the most people or have the largest impacts. We don’t really need the market to “decide” where resources should be allocated.

Governments could issue bounties for drugs that treat diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. Rewards would be based on effectiveness, side effects, how many people are effected, and how severe the illness is. Patents go into the open domain. And while a lot of money might flow to new treatments for big killers like heart disease early on, in later years, other “orphan diseases” would get attention once the higher priorities are better dealt with. Publishing failed research could be incentivized too.

Is there something I’m missing here? Has any nation considered doing this?

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You've just reinvented the Nobel Prize for Medicine. If bounties of the kind you're describing worked, I would think that the Nobel Prize would ,by now, be the medical equivalent of an S&P rating. But it isn't.

A bounty only works when the value of the bounty exceeds the sum of all other opportunity costs. You should probably ask yourself why most doctors or pharmacologists are interested in the practice of medicine and aren't particularly interested in spending their professional years building portfolios of research on rare and difficult to document diseases. Hint: Despite what you claim, there's still a market involved in allocating value to certain specializations and projects over others even in an ostensibly technocratic discipline like modern medicine. You may call it triage, but it's economics at the lowest level.

The medical researchers that do spend their years toiling in obscurity either have enough grant money to do their ivory tower medical research (relatively) undisturbed or they receive so little grant money that they eventually drift into private industry. The person you're looking for is someone who is rational and intelligent enough to do bleeding-edge medicine and yet desperate enough to have one's worth as a doctor/researcher decided by the whim of the government. That's a very small portion of trained doctors and/or medical researchers and most of those would already work at the NIH, FDA, DoH, etc.

It's likely that a bounty won't change things.

I have an opinion that medical industry is so lame like Physics in Antique Greece or maybe even Astronomy in Middle-Age Europe. Lots of stupid regulations, war on drugs, lots of quasi-sciences like Psy*, crysis of reproduction the researches etc. These money will be evaporating into different types of scam, way better for governments is just doing nothing.

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