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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't the government also fund a lot of pharma R&D?

Here's a 2019 article that came up in a Google search: Taxpayers funded this HIV research. The government patented it. Now a company profits https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-gilead-sciences-truva...

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The government funds a lot of early stage preclinical research. These are the inexpensive stages of the pipeline.

As soon as you move into humans you can add another 2 or 3 zeros to your burn rate.

It is not politically feasible for the public sector to fund later stages. The numbers are just too big. Just think of the campaign ads that would run around $200M late stage failure funded by the government.

The reason why mega giant pharma companies exist is because they make enough money and are capitalized enough to withstand multiple $100M failures without going belly up.

Taxpayers fund all sorts of stuff that is ultimately commercialized!

The outcome for taxpayer ROI should be about the benefit to the public at large regardless of who commercialized it. Commercialization should eventually lead to better and cheaper version of the technology, which increases benefit to the public.

Of course, the people who worked to commercialize it deserve pay for their work, so the question is exactly how much.

So that's an argument that the government and the public should get a return on that investment, or profits should be constrained.

Or an argument against exclusive rights being in private hands.

Universities certainly do. IP transfer is big business.

Subsidies for oil, not so much.

The public gets access to a life-saving drug that otherwise would not exist, which is exactly what the government is paying for. You can reasonably argue they they should get more, but arguing that they should get some ROI is moot; they're already getting a tremendous ROI

The public gets the privilege to be price gouged for stuff their taxes paid for. Doesn't sound like a good deal. Many will not have access at higher costs. Price gouging restricts access.

Are you saying the public would prefer that the drug not exist over the drug being expensive? If not, the public is getting a return. Like I said, it is reasonable to argue that the public deserves more return, ie. that it's a bad deal. But the argument that it's paid for by taxes and therefore should provide value to the public falls short of disagreeing with the status quo.

I'm saying it may as well not exist for people who can't afford it. You might say it's worse than not existing when it does exist but they can't have it because you would rather people die than receive treatment, due to your weird ideas about people making money and how justified that is.

Your bend over backwards justification of greed over human life is rather insane.

It clearly seems not to be the case that this treatment "might as well not exist" for people who can't afford it, in that it has been administered to many people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and likely will continue to be.

Further: omit things like your last sentence from your comments; they hurt your case.

> Further: omit things like your last sentence from your comments; they hurt your case.

It hurts people more to deny them medical care, and that is what makes it so enraging, I would say reasonably so. Becoming angry at such absurdity is a reasonable response. I toned it down from something much harsher. It is a truly deranged position to advocate for denying access to health care breakthroughs, and then act like that's doing people favors, calling it expanding access when you want to deny it.

It makes little sense to me to advocate an explicitly inhumane action, then say I'm doing an ad hominem when I call it what it is. What do you call an opposing view which happens to be ad hominem to humanity in general? Misanthropic, I guess. Your sibling comment says hey now, I didn't say any of that, after having said all of that.

You're required to argue civilly here, regardless of how clearly correct your position might be.

That's why people here argue in a passive aggressive fashion and advocate violence indirectly, like violence through economics or violence by withholding medical care or necessary services to undesirables. It doesn't read on the surface as uncivil, while still wanting others to suffer.

I agree about that phenomenon and it doesn't change anything about you shooting yourself in the foot by personally attacking people when making your case. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I don't understand the point of lying about me when all of the evidence is directly above, six sentences in total length, and abundantly clear. That leaves me with the conclusion that, no, indeed, three times was not enough.

>You can reasonably argue they they should get more

>Like I said, it is reasonable to argue that the public deserves more return

>it is reasonable to argue that people should receive more benefit for their tax money

That brings us to six. Can I just add that I think a reasonable argument might be made that the public is entitled to a greater benefit from their contribution to drug research? Or is it supposed to be 77 times 7 times?

If you're using the word "lying" about a comment on an HN thread, it has gone off the rails, and you should stop.

The word was used in the construction 'I don't think it makes sense that you would be lying, therefore I must conclude that I haven't gotten through to you', to justify my repetition.

It certainly has gone off the rails, but I am entitled to defend myself at least as much as you are entitled to tell me to stop. I haven't done anything wrong. I am finished now though

I'm not sure how many times I'm expected to say that it is reasonable to argue that people should receive more benefit for their tax money before you stop accusing me of disagreeing with that. Is it three?

Pardon the snark, but come on. Before you get to the point of throwing insults, take a moment and determine whether I've actually argued for the positions that you believe would make me weird and/or insane. And then don't do it regardless, but definitely don't do it if I've only ever said a very specific thing very precisely and very explicitly.

> The public gets access

Just a reminder that on-patent Truvada cost $4,500 for a 30 day supply of a drug that needs to be taken every day.

What do you mean by "gets access"?

If the R&D cost (including amortised failures and whatever) for some hypothetical drug is $1B and the manufacturing cost is $100M for 100M doses. The drug should cost about $11 + a reasonable markup in a fully private system.

If the R&D costs are fully funded by taxpayers, it should cost $1 + a reasonable markup.

The public doesn't "get" anything if it still costs $11 (+markup) and a company is allowed to take a 1000% profit margin because they're only risking the $100M for the manufacturing.

The R&D costs are absolutely not fully funded by taxpayers.

That's why I used two hypotheticals at each extreme that can be extrapolated to any point in-between...

There is a limited amount of money we can spend on medicine. Every overpriced life-saving treatment kills someone who is in turn denied resources for another life saving treatment.

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