
Don't shut down the pharmacy of the developing world - hargup
http://handsoff.msf.org/
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benevol
Access to drugs should be available to everybody, on a need basis, not wealth
basis. Just like health care in general (or even infrastructure), pharma
research should be financed by taxes.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think we should have both private and government financed pharma research.
The approval process should be the same for both. If private pharma discovers
a drug that is approved - then they should be able to sell it in such a way as
to maximize their profits. If government pharma discovers a drug that is
approved - then they should be able to provide it at cost.

This way we don't have to worry about new drug discovery drying up because of
lack of profits, while at the same time we have a way to allow government
funding for actual drugs that could be provided at low cost.

I think this private-public competition will provide both innovation and low
prices in the long term.

~~~
belorn
We already have private and government financed pharma research. US alone
spends around $26.4 billion each year, which do not include university founded
research (that goes under education) and the other smaller incentive systems
for pharma research by organizations such as FDA (which is a third recipient
of government founds). Regardless, no drugs is provided at cost. Government
founded research is also the primary ground work for which private pharma use,
and private pharma would unlikely survive today without that core research
being done for free.

But maybe government could be more return-on-investment friendly for the
citizens who pay taxes and re-route some of that research founds into actually
developing the end user drugs. At the same time they could create legal
barriers for private pharma from using any tax funded pharma research. That
would create some loud screams from the pharma lobby, and we would finally be
able to say how valuable the patent supported pharma industry really is. I
doubt however we will ever see such day, and patent supported pharma will
continue to claim the glory while tax payers silently pays double for
medicine. First through taxes and then a second time through the expensive
drug prices in the pharmacy.

~~~
drivingmenuts
> private pharma would unlikely survive today without that core research being
> done for free

I tend to view private pharma, as it exists today, as a leech on society, at
best. Perhaps destroying it and making it pay it's own way entirely would be
for the best.

Yes, in the past, private companies did real work and it was beneficial. But,
mostly, they seem to invent cures for problems that get blown way out of
proportion thru marketing directly to the public (restless leg syndrome?
really?).

At a minimum, let doctors become the filter thru which medicine is prescribed,
and put a very heavy penalty in place for pay-to-subscribe.

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EGreg
Going forward, open source would work much better for drugs than for-profit
models. It does the long tail better. Bill Gates famously said that baldness
is treated before malaria because of the aggregate economic power of the
"customers". Similarly, Microsoft etc release Windows for x86 while Linux even
runs on Toasters. Because without patents, anyone in the world can build on
the work of others. Like they do in, you know, science. If they help the third
world it will be by standing on the shoulders of giants, legally:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=93)

~~~
stephanheijl
While I agree with the premise that open source could, in theory, serve the
long tail better, I think the barrier to entry of pharmacological research is
far higher than that of software development. It should be noted that this is
not without reason. Controlled, double-blind studies are necessary for
development of medicine and they are hard to do without a substantial amount
of funds.

This barrier to entry may decrease as biological models become cheaper and
more accessible, but even as a hopeful bioinformatician, I am skeptical of
this happening in the near term (10-15 years).

~~~
crdoconnor
Governments have lots of money.

Even if a government research department was 20% less effective than an
equivalent private sector research department (which I _strongly_ doubt;
they're probably equivalent), it would still be more cost effective. Pharma
marketing budgets are titanic and that's an _epic_ waste of money.

~~~
vonmoltke
I decided to look into this. I pulled the financials for Pfizer, Merck, and
AstraZeneca. Their research and development (R&D) spending, while
significantly less than their Selling, General, and Administrative (SGA)
spending, it is still comparable. Considering SGA includes a lot more than
just advertising I would wager that their actual ad budgets (at least for
Merck and AstraZeneca) are less than their R&D budgets.

Pfizer: $7,690 million R&D, $14,809 million SGA

Merck: $6,704 million R&D, $10,313 million SGA

AstraZeneca: $5,997 million R&D, $9,951 million SGA

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srtjstjsj
homepage is social media fauxtrage garbage, but there is some real information
at [http://handsoff.msf.org/generics-under-
attack#anchor](http://handsoff.msf.org/generics-under-attack#anchor)

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forrestthewoods
That's a lot of shoulds.

I hear government spending on research as part of the defense department is
super effective.

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12189499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12189499)
and marked it non sequitur.

~~~
forrestthewoods
What? That's absurd. It's not a non-sequitur. It's a statement that massive
government research projects are exceptionally overpriced and inefficient.

Maybe a sarcastic comment isn't the most effective means of communication. But
given the quality of the root comment I felt it appropriate.

Here. Let me paste a blurb by Richard Posner from An Economic Analysis of
Copyright Law. Copyright law is not the same as patent law, of course. But the
balance being sought is much the same.

"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good"
aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for
example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or
computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work,
whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often
low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for
these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of
the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged
from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to
cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the
copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of
limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to
create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between
access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright
law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at
least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works
minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering
copyright protection."

~~~
srtjstjsj
Posner says nothing about public vs private funding, and says nothing about
alternatives to copyight protection.

Your follow-up post is another non-sequitur

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fit2rule
In fact, lets shut down pharma-for-profit, at least in the developed world.

