explanade
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- May 10, 2008
- Messages
- 7,439
Perhaps we need a lot more government money funneled into drug discovery if we want to claim possession of these inventions.
We are essentially saying the private market has failed if we put significant caps on drug prices.
I guess we could have taxpayers fund phase I to phase III trials and also be responsible for future lawsuits if a drug passes trials but is later found to have problems. The drug makers would just be a factory and the government could set the price as low as they wanted.
Investors would stick to funding I-phones and restaurants and electric cars.
First of all, I don't know about this $4-10 billion to bring a drug to market.
But actually the big pharma companies spend more on advertising and marketing their drugs than they do on R&D.
Secondly, govt. funds a lot of NIH research and the pharma companies use a lot of that research for free. As someone noted earlier in the thread, in many cases, they just change molecules of a formulation a little and extend their patent protections.
Pharma is one of the most lucrative industries there are.