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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (3144)	12/7/2007 3:06:02 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

And if the companies are squeezed enough, all the drug research will come from the government. If, If, If. If the sun doesn't come up tomorrow who cares about drugs. It's a waste of time to try to debunk fantasy scenarios.

To: Lane3 who wrote (3144)	12/8/2007 10:39:48 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 42652

<<<Whether the government or the drug companies can do R&D better and/or cheaper is another factor. I've never seen a study on the return on each dollar of tax money vs drug company R&D.>>> Most of these studies are a waste of time. I doubt that you can get any meaningful information from any of these studies. Sometimes common sense is as good as any one of these very expensive studies. Take these thoughts as an example: IBM in the 1970-80's spent tons of money on R&D, yet it took Steve Jobs and Bill Gats to get the PC revolution traction. On the other hand, The Internet would never have gotten off the ground if we waited for some kids to set it up in some garage. It was really Al Gore (maybe not specifically Al Gore), but DARPA was absoutely responsible for inventing the Internet. Same thing with projects like going to the moon. Common sense would also tell you that some things healthcare R&D is more suitable for private enterprize and some things need economies of scale that private enterprise are very unlikely to achieve. For anyone to say that they know there is only one way to achieve results is fooling themselves.