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"Currently, there's nothing stopping other countries from using taxpayer money to fund drug development locally. Except, by and large, they don't - as mentioned

"Currently, there's nothing stopping other countries from using taxpayer money to fund drug development locally. Except, by and large, they don't - as mentioned in the article" Come on!! Hasn't anybody actually read the article?? Unless the economist is showing different articles to different people the only phrase that mentions research implies that is an argument made by the industry and not clear at all. The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough.

chimeracoder 10y ago
> The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough. It's a trivially verifiable fact. If you don't like the Economist, here's another source, showing that the US used to fund over 50% of the entire world's medical research. That number has dropped to 44% in the last decade, but only because China and India are growing so fast. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/376801357/u-s-funding-of-health-research-stalls-as-other-nations-rev-up http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/37680135...
- breatheoften 10y ago
  Given the lack of transparency in the billing process for health care services -- there is no part of me that thinks these numbers could provide an accurate representation of expenditures toward actual research. How much research investment actually gets funneled into direct payments towards insurance companies or hospital providers (possibly co-owned by the research funds). The space for financial gamesmanship in the way medical facilities operate in the us is so big that I there's no possibility that this kind of thing is not occurring on a large scale ... if us public/private investment into medical research is so healthy -- why have the job prospects for anyone with a biomedical degree been declining for a decade straight?

chimeracoder 10y ago

> The "the US subsidizes drug research for the rest of the world" is a huge lie that cannot die soon enough. It's a trivially verifiable fact. If you don't like the Economist, here's another source, showing that the US used to fund over 50% of the entire world's medical research. That number has dropped to 44% in the last decade, but only because China and India are growing so fast. http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/376801357/u-s-funding-of-health-research-stalls-as-other-nations-rev-up http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/13/37680135...

breatheoften 10y ago
Given the lack of transparency in the billing process for health care services -- there is no part of me that thinks these numbers could provide an accurate representation of expenditures toward actual research. How much research investment actually gets funneled into direct payments towards insurance companies or hospital providers (possibly co-owned by the research funds). The space for financial gamesmanship in the way medical facilities operate in the us is so big that I there's no possibility that this kind of thing is not occurring on a large scale ... if us public/private investment into medical research is so healthy -- why have the job prospects for anyone with a biomedical degree been declining for a decade straight?