[from]

What people also don't realize is that they only have the 20 year patent period to make money in. After that the drug is copied by generics companies. This incentivises innovation while also not placing a permanent burden on the economy. Pharmaceuticals are 10-20% of healthcare spending and probably have a very good $/lives saved ratio. Isn't it great how you can just take cefalexin instead of having to get cut open and have an infection drained? 90% of all prescriptions in America are for generic drugs that cost almost nothing. It's easy to blame pharmaceutical companies because it is a somewhat concentrated industry but no one questions why their local urgent care physician is making $275,000 a year to basically Google symptoms and give out prescriptions.

[tombert]

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I absolutely question every aspect of why healthcare in the US is overpriced, including but not limited to overcharging for stuff that is a glorified search on webmd.

[sanp]

The 20 year period is based on the assumption that allowing it is beneficial to society overall (inventor shares details to further human knowledge and in return gets to monetize). If this assumption is no longer valid (when pharma companies overcharge) then why should we continue to support such an arrangement?

[Sebguer]

You're preaching a completely false dichotomy here, especially given that much of the research is publicly funded or heavily based upon existing public research, anyway.

[from]

I assume you're referring to studies like https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1715368115 that say publicly funded research has contributed to many major drugs. Yes that is true, but exactly how much is hard to quantify. If designing a new drug just required mooching off existing research the return on investment for making a new drug wouldn't be so high -- there is a reason every week small cap pharmaceutical companies on the NASDAQ either 10x or go to zero because of a drug approval/rejection. They are taking an enormous amount of risk! The average drug that gets approved cost a billion dollars to make.

And I can find studies like: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126

> In 2019, the pharmaceutical industry spent $83 billion dollars on R&D. Adjusted for inflation, that amount is about 10 times what the industry spent per year in the 1980s.

[mlsu]

This is the sad reality. Doctors, hospitals, and healthcare admin. staff consume the fat of healthcare market failure. But nobody wants to blame them -- they like their doctor; being a doctor is hard, so if you are a doctor you deserve a Ferrari.