Comment by Veserv
3 years ago
No, that does not set the right incentives. You have completely written off the harm of dangerous or deadly drugs.
The HepC drug Sovaldi brought in around $50B-100B in sales, but probably costs less than $50 to administer. Under your scheme it would make economic sense for a company to kill 1,000,000,000 people testing variants until they chance upon the right one because they incur no costs for administering deadly experiments.
The problem with your scheme is that human lives are valuable. A unsafe drug that causes harm or death is immensely destructive. If we want to be completely reductive, the actuarial value of a human life is around $10,000,000. A unsafe drug could kill the person resulting in a $10M loss to society. Therefore, the company should be required to escrow $10M per person until the treatment is done, paid out proportionally to any potential death or harm in excess of the gold standard treatment. Only then would the incentives be reasonably aligned.
This is obviously a very reductive treatment, but it helps illustrate the problems with unrestricted testing.
> You have completely written off the harm of dangerous or deadly drugs.
I was only talking about testing on people who we know are going to die fast because of their condition, and we do not have a way to save them in any other way. And naturally only with their consent. People who have a ticking clock and therefore willing to try anything.
This is the context the article in question talks about.
I think you forgot to price in the fact that some people live with what is effectively a time limit sometimes counted in months or weeks (like the person from the linked article).