[djrobstep]

> Marginal improvements are actually a huge deal and make for a lot of improvement.

The problem is that these decisions are made on a marketability basis (hence, a plethora of impotence treatments for rich old men) rather than a public health basis.

> If they don’t pay then either the pace of drug R&D will fall or some other mechanism will need to be found to pay for it.

When you hear about it, the concept of public funding is gonna blow your mind.

[barry-cotter]

Racism and ageism aside I agree with you, but I have serious concerns about any but incremental changes to the system we have, since it works. There’s lots and lots of drug development and we get new and better treatments every year.

My preferred system of public funding would be one where the government buys out a patent and places it in the public domain or a prize system. The government would estimate the value to it (or to its citizens) of curing or alleviating some disease, with some objectively verifiable success criteria and then offer a prize of, say 0.7 that amount.

You get the good parts of private enterprise, like experimentation, knowledge elicitation and market coordination. You also avoid the bad parts of government provision, like endless bureaucracy, form filling and the legendary efficiency of Lockheed Martin. If government pharmaceutical research worked well we'd know. The Soviets developed a different psychiatric pharmacopeia and phages and the Chinese found artemisin but it’s not a great record compared to the West.

Fundamentally someone has to pay for this. Right now its the US consumer. If you want to put that cost onto the budget good luck in politics, whether you’re talking about the US budget, the German one or the Chinese.

[djrobstep]

> Racism

?????

> bad parts of government... Lockheed Martin

????

What you say is absolute FUD. The US already has publicly funded biomedical research, which works fine (the NIH). Just needs to do it all that way and put all the research into the public domain.

> If you want to put that cost onto the budget good luck in politics, whether you’re talking about the US budget, the German one or the Chinese.

Weak argument. The US consumer is already being ripped off by drug and insurance companies, and would save money from a public system.