[cogman10]

> innovation than would happen under a socialized central planning system where government bureaucrats allocate funding for all trials.

What innovation? All the innovation with the current system happens outside the big pharma companies. They are merely swooping in at the final steps and manufacturing to benefit from the public investment.

The actual innovation is happening because of public social investment. Not because if private investment (at least in terms of medicine). Private investment here is simply leaching off of the public investment.

[nradov]

You're ignoring second-order effects. While the big pharma companies do some original drug development themselves, they also commonly acquire start-ups which have promising drugs that aren't approved yet. This is tremendously risky because many of those drugs never get approved, or don't sell very well. Most of those start-ups would never have been founded in the first place if an acquisition wasn't possible.

If we want to have new a lot of new drugs every year that meet the FDA standard for being safe and effective then someone has to put in enormous capital investments. In theory I suppose we could raise taxes and socialize the whole system but so far I haven't seen any evidence that would be a net improvement. More likely just another opportunity for graft and corruption.

[cogman10]

That's not how drug research typically works. There aren't drug research start ups (at least, not a lot of legitimate ones) because developing and researching drugs is a capital intense process.

90% of the system is socialized. The remaining 10% is what pharma funds.

> I suppose we could raise taxes and socialize the whole system but so far I haven't seen any evidence that would be a net improvement.

The entire process is already experiencing the worst parts of what being fully socialized would bring. Everyone is paying for health insurance whose rates are partially set by the cost of the drugs to the general public. We also already pay taxes to develop these drugs via the NIH. Heck, part our taxes pay to manufacture these drugs via the DoD and the VA.

The main benefit of fully socializing these drugs is that it will be cheaper for everyone and we can bring more drugs to market. We don't have to pay advertising, executives, or shareholders for new drugs. We don't have to worry about these new drugs turning a profit.

The graft and corrupting in government is nearly entirely in the form of private contractors working for the government. It's how the current system works where the public funds a huge portion of the research while a few large companies rake in exhobitant fees.

And even worse, we have examples of vioxx, Dalton, and oxy where these companies knowingly push unsafe medicine to turn a profit. That simply doesn't happen with a fully social system as there's literally no benefit to anyone to keeping unsafe drugs around.