> When I get a chance to talk to politicians about how to fix this, I always make the same pitch. Step #1 should be to give a huge wad of money to the FDA. Say $1B/yr. Then you tell the FDA: every year, pick the 50 most promising drug candidates. Publicly fund the clinical trials, and the public will own the patent. Give some cash to the inventor and the institute to incentivize them to do this scheme and not sell to pharma.
This would be abused like any other slush fund. Plus there’s a natural adverse selection bias as all the “really good” patents will go the private route.
The real answer to all of this is to pass a law that drug prices in the USA have to be less than anywhere else on earth. Let that kick off a race to the bottom amongst the world’s countries. Let them eat the cost of constant marketing in the first world.
Some will argue that’s not fair to the millions in less affluent nations. I say who cares? A governments’s foremost job is to protect its own citizens.
The current pharma pricing system milks the American consumer so as to subsidize the rest of the planet. It’s long past time to end that.
This would be abused like any other slush fund. Plus there’s a natural adverse selection bias as all the “really good” patents will go the private route.
The real answer to all of this is to pass a law that drug prices in the USA have to be less than anywhere else on earth. Let that kick off a race to the bottom amongst the world’s countries. Let them eat the cost of constant marketing in the first world.
Some will argue that’s not fair to the millions in less affluent nations. I say who cares? A governments’s foremost job is to protect its own citizens.
The current pharma pricing system milks the American consumer so as to subsidize the rest of the planet. It’s long past time to end that.