Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

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The pat, dismissive response (which you've already gotten several times) is "Hey, cancer research is expensive. Somebody's gotta pay for it."

In a healthy society--at least, a healthy society that is also as wealthy as ours--the solution would be to recognize medical research as a clear public good, and reallocate some of our society's wealth to fully fund both research and production of medicines.

What we have instead is...well, we have a lot of different factors interacting. But just to name a few: we have a government that has convinced us that propping up the military-industrial complex is the most important possible use for billions of dollars, and we have private wealth concentrated in a small number of people who will fight like mother tigers against any attempt to appropriate the smallest amount of their money for the public good.

But that's all complicated and unpleasant to think about. So...hey, cancer research is expensive.

Exactly. We could have a government program to develop nuclear weapons (I wonder if the director of that program made as much as the CEO of Novartis), but we can't have a government program to cure cancer.

There's something wrong with a system where the primary purpose of institutions who fight disease is to make money. Super-valuable research is treated in the same way as making widgets or developing Facebook games -- all that matters is how many dollars it generates for each $100 invested. I find it simultaneously outrageous and ludicrous that the yardstick against which the CEO of Novartis will be judged is how much money the company made, not whether it cured freaking cancer.

I love these sorts of excluded-middle arguments. "Our government wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on war toys that are at best unnecessary and at worst a threat to humanity's continued existence. And as if that weren't bad enough, we have a lot of selfish, wealthy asshats who don't want to give even more of their money to the same government."

The food is terrible. ...and such small portions!

Because not wanting to fund war is exactly the same as not wanting to fund lifesaving cancer research, right?

Yes, it's exactly the same, when you don't trust the government to allocate your tax funds in a sensible manner.

The only diseases governments have helped us with are those addressable by public health programs (and there are quite a few of those, to be fair.) For the rest, no one has ever found a more effective funding mechanism than private industry.

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