this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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This is why pharma research should be publicly funded, and the results go directly into public domain. We will save so much money and lives in the long run that way.
A LOT of pharma research gets significant public funding. They then patent it and privatize the profits. Then spending millions on advertising.
Then they try and justify pricing from the total cost of not only development, but also advertising budgets, while avoiding any mention of where the actual development funding came from in the first place.
That's not for everything, but it's a large enough number of drugs and treatments that the entire industry is based on bullshit.
The bigger one is to decouple development from manufacturing.
Development should be done on a bounty type system. Both countries and individual groups can put money into bounties.
Once the bounty is claimed, then the drug is effectively free for all to produce. This lets us leverage capitalism to push prices down.
This would reshape drug development from max money, to most needed.
I like this - but would companies that fail (in being second) not get credit for their work? You could imagine the second place actually having a more effective product at the end.
You don't have a yes/no payout. You have a graded payout. E.g. you might have a 1 shot cure pay out the full amount, but a sustained treatment only pay a smaller %. This lets you encourage development of the most effective treatment, not the most profitable. It's currently better to make a condition chronic, and so need treatment for a lifetime, than develop a cure.
You also don't pay out all at once. By spreading it out over sat 10 years. It means it can be adjusted if the company's claims are... less than accurate.