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Comment by batista | Hacker News Reader

>Without patents, how is a pharma company expected to pay the enormous cost of research, development, and FDA approval of new drugs?

How about taxes? Drugs that are useful for millions of people can be subsidized --internationally even.

It will make the system even less commercialized (i.e prone to go for quick bucks and BS drugs instead of proper medicine).

Most of the more expensive drugs are of marginal utility anyway. Basic sanitation, running water, staple vaccination and such have much more to do with the general health and long living than even much touted breakthroughs like "heart surgery".

Not to mention that billions have been spent for BS like Viagra and ADD (non)drugs, while 60% of the world's population doesn't even have basic food and vaccines.

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This is exactly right. The problem with the "patents foster innovation" argument is that they don't direct the research money into the areas where they're most needed. Then, because patents initiate a race to recoup research costs before the patent expires, a tremendous amount of money that could be going to research for new drugs instead gets poured into marketing.

That last fact is particularly disturbing when you consider that many doctor end up learning most of what they know about new drugs entering the market from the marketing literature sent to them by pharmaceutical companies. That literature is regulated, and in most cases accurate, but it is also biased.

You are essentially arguing for a central planning approach, and we have ample evidence from the 20th century that this does not produce better outcomes than a market-based approach.

>You are essentially arguing for a central planning approach, and we have ample evidence from the 20th century that this does not produce better outcomes than a market-based approach.

What "ample evidence"? The USSR? For one, they had a mighty fine space program.

Second, one example of central planning, that also carried other kinds of rubbish with it (cutthroat politics at the top level, being enforced on a backwards, non adequately industrialized country, dogmatic ideology, and having to fight a foreign superpower) does not "ample evidence" constitute.

Central planning != 20th century communism. We have much better examples of central planning, successful ones, in the western world.

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