5 ms·
It's a difficult balance to strike - you want the companies to keep developing drugs, you want onerous regulation on those drugs to make sure they're produced a
by rightos 9y ago
It's a difficult balance to strike - you want the companies to keep developing drugs, you want onerous regulation on those drugs to make sure they're produced and tested for safety and efficacy. But then you want them to be cheap for patients and insurance companies.
The best solution is probably to simply drop patent extensions for these things and allow generic drug manufacturers to do what they do best, but if you do that too early you risk damaging funding for new drug development. Too late and you wind up with companies just building up piles of cash like we have today. You need to hit that point of "we need to develop new drugs to make a profit" - what that is, I'm not sure.
- knieveltech 9y agoYou want pharma companies to keep doing drug discovery why not ban outright any kind of marketing or advertising for their products? R&D spend across the industry is a fraction of the marketing spend. Think of all the good research that money would fund once pharma companies were freed from spending it on advertising.
- rightos 9y agoSeems like a reasonable idea to me, has anyone attempted to apply some of the less controversial possible solutions here in the US? Like shorter patent lifetimes or a ban or reduction on drug advertising?
- ajmurmann 9y agoThings definitely have been tried. However, companies find loop holes and frequently things get worse after. Check out this amazing episode of econtalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/06/robin_feldman_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/06/robin_feldman_o.htm...
- djhworld 9y agoWhenever I visit the US I find it insane how much advertising for drugs is shown on TV, with the usual "ask your doctor about..." disclaimer at the end. Why aren't more American's up in arms about this?
- tbihl 9y agoMaybe we know how to avoid the ads better?
- propogandist 9y agodoctors told them they were being rebellious & put them on medications
- hansthehorse 9y agoOnly two countries allow direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising -- New Zealand and the USA.
- amyjess 9y agoIdeally, the government should just straight-up pay companies to do drug discovery using something similar to cost-plus defense contracts (and establish DCAA-style auditing practices to keep them honest). Establish strict price controls, ban drug patents, and make production volume guarantees a hard condition of receiving federal drug discovery money. And the money should be large enough to be worth it. Ideally, 90%+ of a drug company's income should be from federal contracts and not from sales. And if that turns out to not be feasible, just nationalize them. The federal government can hire drug-discovery chemists and manufacture the drugs themselves.
- rightos 9y agoThat's a very left-wing view of things - I don't necessarily disagree with it, but I think there are far less drastic changes that can be made to achieve a comparable result. You'll have a hard time selling a plan like that to anyone even slightly right leaning - think about it politically for a second. The government decides what drug development gets priority? Remember the death panels talk from a few years ago? It's viable, but involves a lot of trust in government, so much that even as a fairly left-leaning person myself I'd have to think twice about it.
- x0x0 9y agoWe're already well down that road via NIH and DOD funding decisions.
- axonic 9y agoI agree that trusting the government is out of the question, perhaps we could try an open source solution. Publish drug data, studies, manufacturing knowledge, and all of the usual pages of warnings, indications, contraindications, pharmacokinetics, etc. GitDrugs.org? I think India might have the right strategy with prioritizing human need over economic factors, at least in the short term. I think the problem with funding is a multidisciplinary one, unrelated to how much they can charge for the product. If we can figure out how to match problems->researchers->funding efficiently and effectively, finding drugs and researching existing ones won't be a problem.
- 9y ago
- dclowd9901 9y agoMy problem is: It's in the public interest for these drugs to exist, but how do we keep drug companies from becoming an industrial complex ala Lockheed/Boeing? They should be non-profits.
- kazinator 9y agoDeveloping drugs is very expensive. It takes years of research, most of which fails. I.e. out of the various molecules being researched, only few actually make it through all the trials and approval and get to market. Due to the risk, investors are looking for high returns from successful drugs.
- belorn 9y agoDue to that risk, the wast majority of base research aren't funded by investors. NiH funding for medical research is the single biggest researcher in the world, with a annual research budget of $26.4 billion. All that is paid double by the citizens, first through taxes and then again through insurance/drug cost. Now imagine if we had a regulation that both forbade universities from issuing patents and limited the price of any drug that is initially based on public funded research.
- kazinator 9y agoWould we also have to refer to the periodic table of the element's as "Mendeleev's Table", or could we not emulate the USSR to such details?