You eat an elephant one bite at a time. If we’re gonna start anywhere, pharmaceutical companies are a fine place to compress margins. You know, because people need these products to survive, and corporate existence as well as profits aren’t guaranteed.
We can always come for additional sectors in the future, depending on objectives and resourcing.
Why don't the scientists actually doing the work of drug discovery just start a not-for-profit, since the executives and shareholders aren't actually adding any value to the customers here?
Do you mean the NSF and NIH? Certainly, fund them with what currently goes to pharma for executives, shareholders, lobbying, and marketing. Fund meaningful work, not gravy for corporate performance artists (Part D is funded by general revenues, beneficiary premiums, and state contributions).
Cut out the middleman.
"In 2021, Medicare Part D covered more than 3,500 prescription drug products, with total gross spending of $216 billion, not accounting for rebates paid by drug manufacturers to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)."
> Peter Maybarduk, the director of the Access to Medicines program at Public Citizen, a watchdog organization, who also testified at the hearing, hit back at the main pharmaceutical talking points along with Sanders. That included noting that the makers of the 10 drugs selected for the first round of Medicare price negotiation spent $10 billion more on self-enriching activities than R&D.
($200B/year buys a lot of manufacturing, distribution, admin, and whatever is left over for amortized and ongoing R&D)
>Fund meaningful work, not gravy for corporate performance artists (Part D is funded by general revenues, beneficiary premiums, and state contributions).
The problem is that nobody actually knows or can predict what "meaningful work" is because drug discovery is a graveyard with a >90% death rate.
Because fundamentally most of science is a dead-end. Most of drug discovery is a further dead end with a 90% failure rate. Nobody wants to pay for it, and big-pharma uses a few blockbuster products to pay for all their other failures.
They did. They work for the US Government which does all the work of drug discovery which gets handed off, along with huge grants and other benefits, to private companies to productive and then sell at ridiculous profits that fuel massive executive pay packages and huge buybacks. The rich get richer while the taxpayers and most users of the ultimate product get screwed. It's really that simple.
Because drug discovery needs patient trials, and the massive cost of those trails drives scientists into the arms of investors and the for-profit sector.
Nah, just someone who has seen exceptional progress from the current WH admin over the last 4 years, and is confident in what future Congressional elections looks like due to electorate turnover (old people dying, young people aging into vote).
About 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, we know how they vote. 4M young folks turn 18 every year, and we have a rough idea what their macro concerns are. Through the electorate death rate, progress is inevitable. This is not magic or miracles, simply systems thinking applied to demographics and political sciences.
Pharma is being challenged in this thread, the tax prep industry with the IRS developing their own tax filing system, FedNow challenging $100B credit card rails industry with cheap utility instant payments. Whose next? was my comment thesis. Important to not say things aren’t impossible when they’re being done. We’re just arguing trajectory and time horizon. Lots of paths to success.
We can always come for additional sectors in the future, depending on objectives and resourcing.