[scotty79]

When the question is stated like that it becomes really questionable whether cost of drugs should have anything to do with drug research cost.

Those two things look like they should be completely separate, done by separate entities with separate funding.

[Brakenshire]

I think the reason you want them connected is the ability to channel private capital towards achieving medical progress.

If there is a disease which costs the general population tens of billions of dollars a year, either in providing healthcare or in an inability to carry on a normal life, work, look after yourself and so on, then there is an inherent and huge pot of money which can go to solving the problem. If you sever the connection, you rely solely on funding achieved through political processes. Which given the level of expensive failure inherent to the process, tabloid campaigns, lack of public understanding, and short termism from politicians, does not seem like something we should rely on.

For instance, can you imagine what the reaction would have been if the hundreds of millions spent on alpha-beta clearance for Alzheimers had been spent by public bodies? Future funding would depend on a battle waged on twitter, opinion pages and talk radio.

[PeterisP]

Furthermore, you could pretty much forget about funding for socially/politically unpopular diseases - I can certainly imagine some voters rabidly requesting their representatives that HIV drugs shouldn't be funded at all because God's punishment should be allowed to take its course.

[scotty79]

> I think the reason you want them connected is the ability to channel private capital towards achieving medical progress.

And yet, despite having that connections, not only in the medicine but in all branches of technology, most impactful discoveries of last century come from tax funded university research not business.

Business is best at researching how to reduce the cost of manufacturing and distribution of a thing. Which is very important by itself. But when it comes to finding new stuff business usually falls short because it's too risky.

> inherent and huge pot of money

Size of this pot of money is direct result of how much the company will be allowed to charge for the drug once it's discovered.

Comapnies are so risk averse that you have to make this pot of gold disproportionately huge by allowing them to charge whatever they will manage to squeeze out of the market.

[naasking]

Should the cost of CPUs be separate from the cost of CPU research? I understand it seems distasteful to place a cost on health and life, but isn't that just a reality? Everything has a cost. As long as the cost of drugs were reasonable, we wouldn't need to have these conversations.

[scotty79]

> Should the cost of CPUs be separate from the cost of CPU research?

Maybe not now when researching CPUs is fairly easy. But a century in the future? When faster CPUs will be very hard to invent but essential to human survival? Maybe.

Business is great at researching processes of manufacturing. Not so good when it comes to researching actually new stuff.

> As long as the cost of drugs were reasonable, we wouldn't need to have these conversations.

But they must become unreasonable at some point if they cost as much as the incentive for research for companies. Companies are most risk-averse entities in existence. It's not unexpected that they need unreasonably high incentives to take up the risk of doing research.

[naasking]

> When faster CPUs will be very hard to invent but essential to human survival? Maybe.

I'd say we're already at the point that they are essential to our survival, at least for societies as they currently exist. CPUs are also hard to invent, and hard to progress already, requiring hundreds of millions of dollars for each new iteration.

> Business is great at researching processes of manufacturing. Not so good when it comes to researching actually new stuff.

I don't believe it. Most of the things we currently use were invented by businesses, or by someone who then started a business to sell it.

> But they must become unreasonable at some point if they cost as much as the incentive for research for companies.

Again, you're assuming the conclusion. Maybe this is the case in some circumstances, but it's a assuming a lot to claim this is the case for all companies and all drugs.

And if the cost is really this high, then incentivizing more creative approaches to treatment might just be better anyway. It shows a lack of imagination if we can only use a hammer when faced with a health problem.

[scotty79]

> Most of the things we currently use were invented by businesses, or by someone who then started a business to sell it.

Yes. I don't say business is useless when it comes to research. Business is great at researching how to tune the production process so that the thing they went to produce is affordable for as many people as possible.

Every invention goes through business to reach you. But it usually starts at the university on in military research.

> Again, you're assuming the conclusion.

I don't think I do.

1. Companies fund research with selling drugs they invent.

2. Inventing drugs gets more expensive.

1 & 2 => drugs get more expensive.

[naasking]

> 2. Inventing drugs gets more expensive.

1. You're assuming drug research gets more expensive, but in some ways it actually becomes easier, ie. with better computers we can ensure some clinical trials have a higher success rate with computer modelling.

2. Your original claim was that they become unreasonably expensive, which is a stronger claim than just expensive. Furthermore, this expense would still be incurred by any other entity that does this research, so you're not saving anything in the end.

[scotty79]

1. I think I never seen any claim that inventing new drugs gets less expensive although I agree that's theoretically intermittently possible untill the fact that we are running out of substances to try overcomes cost benefits of given technological breakthrough.

2. If something gets constantly more expensive it will eventually become unreasonably expensive for any chosen definition of unreasonable. Unless general wealth of human race grows faster than cost of research which doesn't look plausible.

What I'm saying in the end is that the cost will be higher if the company is involved because companies are so risk averse that they demand insanely high potential rewards to take the risk. The other thing I'm saying is that if you are going to fund reserach with drug sales but in the end will have to subsidize drug buyers from taxes (because they can't afford meds) it may be just better to fund research from taxes directly and charge for drugs only as much as their manufacturing costs as it is now in case of generics.