[yareal]

You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine? Especially if that research focused not on "what's the most profitable medicine" but rather "what medicine would increase well being the most"?

You really can't imagine that decoupling the profit motive from drug research is possible?

[jandrewrogers]

Government investment in biomedical research has a history of following political fashion rather than optimizing for the best outcomes. Diseases that a politician cannot talk about in a press conference don’t get funded. The rise of private foundations funding a large percentage of all biomedical research was a response to government, and sometimes companies, reliably ignoring major medical research areas.

[jampekka]

[citation needed]

Research funding is allocated mostly by the academic community itself, via panels consisting of academics. This does have problems of its own, but they have little to do with politics as in elected politicians. Policians can have some influence on general directions, but it's quite limited.

What you say sounds very much based on the general anti-government and anti-democratic ideology rather than evaluation of history.

[jandrewrogers]

I am familiar with the history. The problematic gaps in medical research are well-known even within the government communities with budget for biomedical research. Ironically, the US military has ended up funding, despite their more limited budget and no real mandate, basic medical research into common non-military diseases like multiple sclerosis that NIH/NSF ignore but have obvious ROI for reducing population-scale medical costs (which affects the military but is outside the scope of its mission). Similarly, the rise of privately funded foundations to fill persistent odd gaps in government-funded biomedical research are well-documented.

The large increase in non-traditional funding orgs for biomedical research over the last several decades has been driven by a widespread perception that the traditional government funding has been increasingly captured by a academic cliques with low ROI priorities.

I've worked in government science orgs, the capture of funding control by ideological academic cliques is very common. It has unfortunately infested the biomedical research funding, which reduces realized ROI from the money allocated to those orgs. In the US government, some of the best medical R&D ROI dollar-for-dollar right now is found in the military, but that really shouldn't be their job outside of traditional areas like trauma medicine.

[kloop]

> You wouldn't put aside, say, 3% of your taxes to fund research into medicine?

Not if it goes through the traditional grant process. I've fundamentally soured on that.

Maybe an open bounty system? First one to develop an effective drug for X gets their costs paid for + 1 billion or something (number pulled straight out of my ass, feel free to adjust)

[jampekka]

Nobody should get or have 1 billion dollars. Not even close. I've fundamentally soured on that.

But even that would be better than the current system where people that have nothing to do with the research get obscene amounts of money solely on the merit of having obscene amounts of money.

[jampekka]

You probably do put quite a chunk of your taxes to fund research in the medicine, and pharma profits on top. Especially outside US drugs are typically bought with public funds. With the privatized drug development model we just get extra middlemen leeching off profits.