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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Pharmaceuticals is a pretty capital intensive industry. Who's providing the capital? The government? Moreover, who's providing oversight? Congress? Given how dysfunctional the government is right now, and the tendency of government programs to turn into jobs/pork barrel programs (eg. F35), I'm skeptical that it's going to work out better.

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> Pharmaceuticals is a pretty capital intensive industry.

The larger part of that is sales and marketing. They spend more on sales and marketing than research and development in USA. All that is wasted, publishing lots of manipulative ads and marketing material to get as many as possible to buy the most expensive medicines isn't a good use of our resources.

https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-study-in-the-midst-of...

1. The study in question is from ahip, which is a trade association of health insurance providers. They have an incentive to push the blame of high healthcare costs on other companies, so claims by them should be taken with a grain of salt.

2. The above link doesn't actually actually provide the study, or mention the methodology. However searching around[1] it looks like similar claims in the past have issues, mainly due to how expenses are categorized in financial statements. Specifically, advertising/marketing spend is often lumped together with general and administrative spend, which overstates that figure.

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/16472/do-typica...

Moreover, what happens to all the work in progress when the government "shuts down"? People in publicly funded science have lost work in previous incidents where they were locked out of their buildings and unable to tend to long running experiments. America needs to work on its uptime.

As usual, the biggest factor is ignored:

        Risk

Who takes the risk of exploring a drug candidate that literally no one can predict will succeed or fail?

Let's imagine the Secretary of Drug Development testifying before Congress on why so many of his drugs didn't work. His best strategy is to only pursue safe bets.

you're not aware that government and universities provide half the funding of basic research in the united states?

I'm in agreement here, I think the poster has an idea of the issue with profits, but typically anything the government can do, we can do infinitely better private.

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