[mfer]

I've been reading some books on the medical industry and one of the things pointed out is that the price controls will often not provide enough profit to R&D new drugs. That the US ends up subsidizing a lot of R&D cost that everyone benefits from.

If this is the case, I wonder what would happen to drug development if that goes away.

Note, I'm not saying there's not too much profit from drugs. These statements don't have anything to do with that.

[lostcolony]

So that assertion is only sorta true.

Initial discovery research is pretty much entirely tax payer funded. There's then a second phase, moving from that discovery to POC, that is extremely underfunded, and which a lot of charity and such funding goes toward. It's only the last phase, taking POCs -> product, that companies really invest in. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/

Now, that capital investment is not a trivial amount of money (about 80 billion in 2018 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/265085/research-and-deve... ), but it still is only 17% of drug company revenues - https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060115/how-much-dru...

Note, too, that private companies tend to fund research toward common first world diseases, since they're profit driven, and far less to niche and/or common third world diseases. So not only do they not fund early discovery (government does that), nor generally moving those discoveries to POCs ('valley of death', and charitable foundations and the like do that), they also leave plenty of potential meds untouched, since the likely profitability is low.

[SuoDuanDao]

I've heard that argument, not sure how much I buy it. Seems the drugs that get developed tend towards niche applications, while common diseases that affect mostly uninsured people are addressed by places like the Gates foundation.

[heavyset_go]

The NIH already funds a significant amount of drug R&D in the US.

[pkaye]

If this is true, what is the point of US consumers subsidizing the R&D is they themselves cannot benefit from it.

[lazyasciiart]

The rich ones can benefit from it, and then it gets added to the claims that the US has the world's best healthcare system that helps convince the rest that the system should be kept.

[Auracle]

That’s why we should tie our drug prices to the prices other countries pay. I believe Trump did that (or talked about doing it?) for Medicare, but it’s absolutely insane we haven’t done it across the board.

Republicans would be hesitant due to “regulations bad,” and Democrats don’t want to improve our current system because they’d rather throw it out. And of course both sides get donations from pharma.