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> I think the answer is that drug development is the kind of process which public institutions are particularly ill suited to manage. > A drug company is free
by redial 8y ago
> I think the answer is that drug development is the kind of process which public institutions are particularly ill suited to manage.
> A drug company is free to pursue and fund development of drugs based on merit alone.
What?
The argument that only they can provide what the public needs is just an excuse to avoid competition, as it is everytime you hear it being made in any industry: Municipal broadband is not able to fulfill the requirements of the fast-pacing telecommunications market so we should outlaw it and subsidize the private sector even more so you can finally have that 1MB dsl line you were due in 1999.
The Pharma industry has been "caught" many times preferring and in some cases preventing development of "cures" to instead sell long lasting treatments. Like most businesses, the only merit they care about is what makes them the most money, and there is nothing wrong with that, but let's not make them the gallant saviors of the masses when their evident greed becomes apparent every quarterly report and lobbying all over the world to avoid any form of competition is just the latest example of it.
- Gatsky 8y agoI don’t see any argument refuting my point that governments could not replace big pharma. I agree with you that big pharma are like any other large corporation at the end of the day, it’s all about the bottom line. It is however an indisputable fact that big pharma have delivered novel drugs which do make a large difference to many patients’ lives. The scale of their research operations dwarfs all other biomedical research by orders of magnitude. It is highly speculative that a public institution could do research at this scale. If you have ever worked in an academic department this would be immediately obvious.
- redial 8y ago> I don’t see any argument refuting my point that governments could not replace big pharma. I'm not trying to. I'm refuting the argument that they "develop drugs based on merit alone" and thus somehow because of that don't need competition.
- prolikewh0a 8y ago>The Pharma industry has been "caught" many times preferring and in some cases preventing development of "cures" to instead sell long lasting treatments. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...