My premise is that drugs are expensive because it costs a lot of money to get a drug developed, not because IP enables companies to collect value they didn't cr

My premise is that drugs are expensive because it costs a lot of money to get a drug developed, not because IP enables companies to collect value they didn't create. IP is a mechanism that incentivizes investment into a field that is publicly valuable. And it's not that great of an incentive because even with IP most drug r&d is not a great investment But most importantly, nationalizing drug research would probably make healthcare more expensive, not less. It's a red herring in the healthcare cost debate. Honestly my tinfoil hat theory is that hospitals, which have a ton of political clout (AHA lobby spends about as much as Phrma lobby, but hospitals are top employers in most areas so have a ton of soft political power), drive the drug pricing narrative to distract from the bad stuff they get away with. Tinfoil theory but I don't think it's too crazy That aside, US spends like $320B on rx drugs. Let's say that goes to zero with your plan. Then we increase NIH budget by $150-200B -- assuming government is just as efficient as private industry. That just covers R&D. You still need infrastructure covering prescription processing, drug manufacturing, distribution, quality control, etc. you'd need to set all that up from scratch, because you wouldn't have a private infrastructure. Could that be $100B? Maybe. So you're breaking even And if government is half as efficient as private industry? If it's an order of magnitude less efficient? Ouch My reasoning may be off bc it's Friday night but I think it's directionally correct. But more importantly: why are we focusing on this in the first place? Do we actually think we can pass legislation to quintuple the NIH budget even if we should (And I don't think we should) Wouldn't our efforts be better spent addressing the largest source of healthcare spend and biggest source of rent seeking behavior?