Comment by tptacek
1 year ago
No, I simply pointed out that it costs billions to bring a drug to market --- before marketing --- and that you can't plausibly recoup those expenses for a cost-plus priced product. Do you have a response to that? I'm not interested in expanding the argument.
I don't think we need to recoup those expenses. Fund R&D with public money, once a drug is developed and tested it becomes a common good and should pay for itself with the gain of productivity obtained from a healthier population.
Again: I'm really not interested in litigating how drug production would function under an entirely different economic system, only in pointing out an issue with the logic you used in critiquing this system.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to understand what you're even arguing about. My original comment was:
> Which is why there should be no patents in healthcare. Most research is already publicly-funded, production and distribution should be too. We could drown in cheap medicine, instead we artificially increase the prices by 5000% to fatten the pockets of already super-wealthy parasites.
If a company sells a pill for $100 that cost them $2 to manufacture, that's a 5000% markup. Indeed, they would need to recoup R&D expenditures, but I am arguing for a system where we don't need to, because R&D is paid for by the state, and we don't need to turn a profit once the product has been developed. Where's the logic flaw?
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