> I especially find interesting the proposal to use R&D for the pharmaceutical industry from the Government. I just don't know how practical that is. It would n

> I especially find interesting the proposal to use R&D for the pharmaceutical industry from the Government. I just don't know how practical that is. It would need serious commitment and serious investment from Governments to do that. You're quite right in this analysis - especially with your followup about this being the most applicable where healthcare is also paid by the government. In Europe, 83% of the pharma revenue - on average - comes from taxpayer money, mostly through drug subsidies. Yet, only 15% of their revenue total is used for R&D (and another 30% of the total is used for manufacturing), according to the pharma industry's own numbers. So if we pay all of those 30 percent units for manufacturing from the tax coffers, another 15 percent units is needed to bring research on par. That takes us to 45 percent units - but we're paying for 83 percent units today. We can afford to double the research and still save a significant chunk of taxpayer money. This doesn't even begin to take into account that 70% of today's new pharmaceuticals are so-called copycat drugs with no other purpose than to circumvent another company's patent monopoly. If we assume that these resources will be spent researching new drugs instead, as nothing is patent-encumbered, we have tripled the research just in forcing drugs to be generic, before taking actual increases or decreases in research funds into account. The loser here is the pharma industry's "marketing" account, which has been overly well-fed with taxpayer money. Cheers, Rick