Prizes would not fix most of the issues. This is going to sound very left wing, but if you want cures for the things the market are ignoring, then the appropriate mechanism for that is the government. Taking it to the limit, the simplest reform for medical research would be to stop granting patents on medicines and then redirect the savings this would create for national health systems as all medicine becomes “Generic” into a gigantic “International Institute For Health”
The idea being that the total health budget for the governments involved would be exactly the same, but incentives would now align better, and at least twice as much money would go to actual research as there would no longer be any need for marketing new drugs.
Uhm. I think I just persuaded myself that patent law is a just a bad idea, full stop. It certainly is not working as intended in the tech sector, and this looks like an argument that we can do better in medicine too.
The National Institute for health does produce new treatments. So does the state research programmes of the rest of the first world—Research is one of the core competencies of government—if you can persuade politicians to pour enough money into it, returns are good.
Most importantly, government can—and does—undertake research projects no corporation would ever attempt. CERN is not something the private sector would fund this side of the singularity. And in this case, government is /already/ paying for the research. The monopoly rents extracted by pharma come out of taxpayer pockets, so for all intents and purposes, they are nothing more than government contractors. And verily, they suck at their jobs. Heck, this even holds in the US, despite the accounting dodge. Mandatory insurance is a tax.
So, when I propose that the governments of the west wake the heck up and move the research they are already paying for in-house so that half the money stream no longer gets wasted on marketing and CEO boni, that is not communism. It is just sensible policy.
Prizes would not fix most of the issues. This is going to sound very left wing, but if you want cures for the things the market are ignoring, then the appropriate mechanism for that is the government. Taking it to the limit, the simplest reform for medical research would be to stop granting patents on medicines and then redirect the savings this would create for national health systems as all medicine becomes “Generic” into a gigantic “International Institute For Health”
The idea being that the total health budget for the governments involved would be exactly the same, but incentives would now align better, and at least twice as much money would go to actual research as there would no longer be any need for marketing new drugs.
Uhm. I think I just persuaded myself that patent law is a just a bad idea, full stop. It certainly is not working as intended in the tech sector, and this looks like an argument that we can do better in medicine too.
Did Soviet Russia produce a lot of new drugs for the money that they invested in that research?
The National Institute for health does produce new treatments. So does the state research programmes of the rest of the first world—Research is one of the core competencies of government—if you can persuade politicians to pour enough money into it, returns are good. Most importantly, government can—and does—undertake research projects no corporation would ever attempt. CERN is not something the private sector would fund this side of the singularity. And in this case, government is /already/ paying for the research. The monopoly rents extracted by pharma come out of taxpayer pockets, so for all intents and purposes, they are nothing more than government contractors. And verily, they suck at their jobs.
Heck, this even holds in the US, despite the accounting dodge. Mandatory insurance is a tax. So, when I propose that the governments of the west wake the heck up and move the research they are already paying for in-house so that half the money stream no longer gets wasted on marketing and CEO boni, that is not communism. It is just sensible policy.
Which specifc treatments of the last two decades do you mean?