[stranded22]

If the top 1% paid their employees more, then there would be less reliance on the state and more people would be paying more tax.

As it stands, people who are in work are still requiring state help because they are not earning enough.

[candiodari]

The problem with this is that the wealth of the rich wouldn't pay for much earnings.

I mean people complain about medicine as well. And then you check. If we fully nationalized all pharma, and put their profits at zero (but kept development going) ... that would mostly be a 10% drop in the cost of medicine on average at most (more like 2-3% for the really common ones), 20% for some of the more expensive ones and there would be the exceptional medication getting 25% off.

This is not the price reductions for medicine that people are looking for when they're complaining ...

I suspect this is similar. If you redirected all profits to employees, it would be those sorts of numbers. 10% more. 20% more, with 30-60% of the increase going to the state. 100% and more increases would be limited to some companies that are already paying pretty well, like Google or Facebook.

So this simply does not provide a solution.

[jfernandezr]

What study supports your claim that a nationalised pharma industry could lower prices at most 25%?

Do you know the cost of insulin in the USA and its cost in the EU, although being both private companies?

[candiodari]

INSULIN is bloody cheap. You want the old bovine insulin in common use 15 years ago, and still in use in much of the world? You can get a bucket of it for ~$200.

There's problems with it. It's not the right variant of insulin, it's very fast acting, requiring you to do the measurement-inject dance every 2 hours or so. It's slightly uncomfortable to have in your veins (because it's not really purified, and includes a couple thousand other proteins, some of which are irritating) ...

Re-inventing insulin the way people want it to work:

1) adaptive. Currently means combining making minute quantities work perfectly, but slowly, which is, of course, a total contradiction.

2) the perfect form of insulin, not just the human form, but variants that actually feel better, for you personally (ie. not the same variant for every patient)

3) VERY long lasting (which is of course also a total contradiction because the dose has to vary over time, however 4, even 24 hours without eating, is doable)

4) Keep developing this further, to get to oral application, but at some point totally adaptive without an implant would be excellent.

5) without using animals, or even animal cells (even though that doesn't really matter)

6) oh and without using cancerous cells, which is the other trick we know

7) so in essence using the newest, most expensive, most patented trick we know, "yeast expression"

8) which necessitates the most expensive protein purification tricks we know

9) administered using an implanted insulin pump

10) all of this approved by doing studies on >5000 patients (who get all medical care necessary for such studies for free for at minimum 2 months)

Yes, this is expensive. And, uh, well of course it is. Now, I get it, the best treatment is the best treatment and the most expensive one, and everyone should get it, and of course doctors will advise the most expensive one, for good reason. But there's currently various compromises available too.