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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

I wholly believe there are hundreds of thousands of researchers who would happily spend their lives in poverty researching cures. The difficulty is that you can't research a cure to anything that's still uncured in a garage with the money you make begging on the street, or manufacture whatever cures you do discover.

The corporations who have billions and billions to spend on it, they need a profit motive to give someone a research budget. It's why they have the billions and billions.

It's not the only system imaginable, but it's the one we got.

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I am not saying researchers should live in poverty. However, the Forbes article is peppered with distasteful quotes from CEOs salivating over the billions they stand to make from cancer treatments. Imagine a real person saying "Sure, I could help you with your cancer... if you make me rich" -- they would be called a psychopath. But corporations somehow get a pass.

Why can an Internet store convince its investors to operate at a loss, while a pharmaceutical company cannot tell its investors: "Hey guys, we're working on a freaking cancer cure for humanity, this is way bigger than space travel, so we're not going to be profitable in the near future, a'ight?".

It really depends how the pharmaceutical company is using its quadruple profits. If it is using them for executive compensation, returns to the investors, and gold plated fountains, that's one thing. The corporation could be focused on the short term extraction of as much money from as many dying people as possible.

However, the corporation (and its investors) focusing on long term profits and long term good is not incompatible with charging quadruple the price for its existing drugs. Bringing in more money faster means having more money to reinvest on R&D to research more new cures faster. In which case, double the price again if insurance companies will keep paying it.

At the end of the day those obscene profits are coming from insurance premiums spread over nearly the entire population, making it effectively a private sector tax. If that tax is, in fact, largely going to cancer research, I'm OK with it.

Of course, I'd personally prefer a public sector tax that I knew was going to research and not gold-plated fountains.

Good points. A system with universal private health insurance and pharma companies that reinvest all their profits into research seems equivalent to a system with publicly funded research. (Of course, in private systems there are many uninsured people -- doubling the price of cancer treatments means, to some extent, funding future research from poor, sick people.)

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