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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 0001
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Don't think private medicine companies are such a bad thing - there can only be so much research that is publicly funded and we can potentially miss out on some life saving drug not getting developed.
Imo a better solution would be decreasing the patent age so that the companies have only a small window to generate profit, after which the drugs would go into public domain. 20 years is way too long to profit of a discovery
This drug got a huge amount of public funding.
At its core, there's two competing ideas here, and neither are inherent corporate greed (although that's certainly the motivation for JJ).
Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.
A medical discovery which helps people should be as widely and readily accessible as possible.
The second has to be achieved no matter what, so the question is how you provide a profit motive for discovery while not making the product exclusive. What if instead of exclusivity, the creator received preferential treatment? The government buys X of the new drug, and the creator can supply that full amount -- if they can't though, then others can fill the gap. This needs more consideration, but the basic idea is that the creator gets to sell their supply first, and others can sell after that.
Yeah...You need to profit to incentivize innovation and r&d. Fine.
Why does that mean you should get total control? Especially for drugs - for many reasons (it's a very messed up industry), but most of all because public health affects all of us - not just when we're directly connected to the victims.
Already, patents are basically a temporary monopoly. The government sets all sorts of weird limits. It's not a free market, not even remotely close
So why should they get total control instead of fixed percentage by anyone making the drug? Maybe limited to time frame, maybe based on a multiple of cost
Hell, uncle Sam pays for a lot of this research, and the big players spin off subsidiaries to subsidize the risk. We could offer bounties or make the research fully public. There's so many ways to do this better
Instead, we use a method where corporations get to make decisions, with zero concern over the cost in lives, or the drain on society it causes
I think it's important to distinguish the underlying goal from the mechanism used to achieve this. (In software user story development we distinguish between the "so that" and the "I want".)
So I would restate this as:
This does not need to be via a period of exclusivity. Exclusivity is one way of doing it, and it's a pretty good one, but jumping ahead to that shortcuts the ability to come up with other possibilities.
Agreed. There's other ways to accomplish this, and that should be the case for medicines.
Well yeah that's why I said not to undercut private companies, which would be uncompetitive and force them out of business. Mix of public and private.