Dan,
I have not taken a drug from the pharmaceutical industry probably for 2 decades, mainly because I think the vast majority of drugs do more harm than good. So I will be the last person to defend the drug companies, but in general, I am against confiscation of private property.
Most drug development costs are trivial compared to drug marketing costs, though the drug companies do their very best to keep that little secret to themselves.
This is the case for many industries. The fact that drug company A spends 1/3 of their combined research + marketing dollars on research, and company B spends 2/3 on research does not make company A evil, and the assumption that they are evil is not justification for confiscation of their property. This only means that the company B will probably develop better drugs, but will sell fewer of them. Kind of like AMD.
Most medical research is not funded by drug companies, either.
There is an inherent contradiction in the existing patent law, economics and health benefit when it comes to privately funded medical research.
-The best way to obtain a return on money invested in medical research is to develop a drug.
-The patent law doesn't provide for a way to patent natural substances, only artificial substances.
-The unnatural substances are generally harmful to human bodies, and are generally developed to hide the symptoms of a problem (definition of a success) rather than cure it
-natural substances can heal or strengthen human body, so that it can fight the disease, but there is no incentive to invest private research money, since the outcome of the research can not be patented
Based on this, you may say "why doesn't the government pay for more of the research?" The government does pay a lot. The only problem is that the people who are in charge of allocating this money are under a lot of influence of the establishment, the sick care industry. So the public taxpayer money spent on research does not end up benefiting the public. Most of it just ends up in the pockets of the medical establishment and the industry.
This is something to keep in mind when people advocate spending more tax dollars on the medical research.
Joe |
