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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Up here in the Socialist Republic of Canada, the counterfeit drug criminals are so entrenched in power that when you fill a prescription, the pharmacist is required by law to offer you the counterfeit drug alongside the brand-name drug, usually at about 25% of the brand name drug’s price.

Worse, the spin-masters in power have taken control of the conversation, everyone in Canada calls them “generic” drugs, as if molecules and atoms were identical to each other and there’s no difference besides the logo stamped on the pill and the label glued on the bottle.

And we’re prisoners of the system, trapped in the endless nightmare of free health care.

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>And we’re prisoners of the system, trapped in the endless nightmare of free health care.

As a fellow prisoner of Soviet Kanuckistan, I feel I must rebel against the Department of Truth and point out that we pay, dearly, for health care. Interestingly, however, we spend only slightly more than our free brethren to the south: 7% vs 6.7% GDP (this is only public, not private spending).

pdf warning: http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2009/fin/F2...

Is the generic model enough to fund actual R&D for new medicine? Eg, if generic were legalized everywhere, including the US, and it undercut pharmaceuticals so much that they went out of business, would new drug development cease?

Not that I'm a fan of intellectual property, but I do recognize that there are a few areas where the upfront investment to produce the product is so massive, and copying the final product so easy, that it might make sense to guarantee the profits for a period of time.

Does the pro-generic side have any data or counterpoint to that?

Back in the day before "big pharma", medical advances came out of Universities, many of them publicly funded. I think if the big pharma were cut off at the knees funding-wise, we'd see a resurgence in academic research.

Which I personally think is far better, because typically (not always of course) academics will share and collaborate, instead of being in walled gardens.

Exactly.

Ah, thanks, didn't know that. I suspect that would be far better for another reason as well - less funding and brain power spent on Viagra and 'quality of life' drugs, and more on cancer, AIDS, and other major but perhaps less profitable epidemics.

It will fund research, but not multi-billion dollar TV advertising campaigns.

If medicine came from R&D sponsored by the government, I think we'd live in a better place.

That's because big-pharma companies love to focus on treatments, not on prevention and they also like to focus on controlling the disease instead of curring it.

Like in the case of allergic asthma, why treat a patient once when you can take money from him monthly?

To play devil's advocate, the moment the government gets involved, so do politics.

Contraception and sexually transmitted diseases - will the religious right / moral majority voters turn against a representative who supports medical research for these?

What about diseases associated with lifestyle - smoking, alcohol, obesity. Will a parent group ask why X million is going to emphysema research when it could have gone to childhood cancer research instead? What about the anti-vaccine groups? Vegan/Vegetarian groups? Whatever other special interest group or political viewpoint?

I really don't want to see Bill O'Reilly or Rosie O'Donnell on tv expressing their outrage at why funding is going to curing the wrong diseases/disorders.

Why is it that a pharmaceutical company spends billions upon billions on R&D and only gets to patent it product for 20 years, but some poxy artist/record label gets paid royalty for a cajillion years.

There's something very wrong there...

I'm in 2 minds about the whole medicine patent thing. One the one hand, as you say, new medicines would not be developed but on the other hand the patents drive the prices so high that people in 3rd world countries cannot afford them. It also means medicines for 3rd world diseases are not worthwhile for the large pharmas. There really needs to be a better balance, maybe spending 5-10% of their R&D on medicines they know will never see it's return on investment but will save many more lives than their high profit products.

Generic medicines aren't available until the 20-year patent period runs out. Some of the profits from the patent period go to more research to make new drugs and obtain new patent rights. (Pharma is one of the exceptional few fields in which patents promote innovation instead of taking their usual role of blocking it.)

The additional profits that come from lobbying after year 20 to keep out generics don't get reinvested into more research, they get reinvested into more lobbying.

What makes the entire industry possible is that Canada only grants drug patent protection for five years, while America grants drug patent protection for twenty. Therefore, there’s a fifteen-year period during which Canadian companies can legally manufacture generic drugs that are illegal to import into the USA.

I suspect a lot of the talk about counterfeits and generics misses the third category, generics that are contraband in the USA because they are still under patent protection.

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