You could fill notebooks with worthy, approachable hypotheses for any number of diseases that could show promise if given the funding.
But if everyone makes it law to cap prices - fewer scientists, labs, studies are performed.
The money has to come from somewhere.
I think countries take for granted the progress we've made. No progress is made without incredible intellectual efforts and monetary backings.
This is a silly talking point that lots of companies bounce around - you know how insulin costs money because it was so expensive to develop... Except no, it was invented in Canada and the researchers released the formula for free[1] as a "benefit to humanity" thing... then a few US companies acquired rights to produce it and proceeded to establish market control in the US - the fact that insulin isn't being sold at cost is just pure greed.
And this happens a lot, very often drugs are innovated using public funds and then sold to private companies to produce which milk the consumers for profit - this whole "it pays for R&D" is a pharmaceutical PR line, just like when McDonalds buried their hot coffee lawsuit under "well, if people weren't such klutzes". The US isn't the great innovator here to save us all and a huge proportion of your drug prices cycles back into marketing to sell more of the drug.
[1] Technically, they sold it for a dollar to the University of Toronto
Money matters. Marketing to recoup costs matters. Piles of cash to get every dollar of return on an investment matters. That allows the company to turn around and invest in future promising drugs, trials, other companies, marketing to bring awareness to the solution and hopefully get people to buy and use it.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/public-p...
One quote from the paper: In the last ten years, Pizer has spent US$139 billion on share buybacks and dividends compared to US$82 billion on R&D.
Edit: It shouldn't require massive profit margins to make the drug industry work for a basic human need like healthcare. Other sectors for human basics like the grocery industry, run on margins of 1-5%.
If you want thin margins, maybe government research wing can take its findings from idea to market (imagine waiting on a cure and that’s your only hope?)
But you can’t force a private company to operate on low margins by way of capping prices, you’ll kill them. You can’t taje away their ability to control their risks (cash flow). Drug R&D already has a huge failure rate and now the company can only take a 5% profit on the slight chance they’ve found something effective?
I wish we could stop using this tired trope once and for all in debates about medical care.
Most medical care is routine and does not require cutting edge drugs. Things like insulin, epinephrine, anesthetics, antibiotics, antihistamines, vaccines, most of those things have been developed in the 1st half of the 20th century.
How much do the cutting age drugs account for in the scope of the total health care costs in the US? Even if it was higher than 1% (I'm willing to bet money that it isn't), the marketing budgets for drug companies far exceed their R&D spending.
business drug R&D follows the "which drug patents can we buy and Jack the prices up for extra profit?"
One worrying thing about single-payer healthcare in America is that we can look at other countries with a _rich history_ of single-payer healthcare from before the modern era [0] and see that they have developed efficient public healthcare systems, but it does not follow that our system, with its similarly rich history of for-profit entities developing methods to thrive in the weird world of American health insurance, can be immediately brought to a level of cost efficiency that is comparable. Consider, for instance, how much ownership of the healthcare space is held by private equity firms in the U.S. I'd love to see a great transition plan towards single payer, but it would need to be one that takes into account that the operators have no inherent incentive to reduce costs.
[0] http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/96410/E7...
[1] https://www.healthcoalition.ca/tools-and-resources/history-o...
But basically, future history begins today. I don't see why because we historically have an ineffective system, we shouldn't strive to build a working system.
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/08/10/the-fix-f...
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/
An excellent book on the subject ("The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care"):
https://www.amazon.com/Healing-America-Global-Better-Cheaper...
And a comparison by The Commonwealth Fund:
http://international.commonwealthfund.org/
And just a reminder how long the U.S. has been having this argument:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_19...
And a quote from that page:
The long-term political effects of a successful... health care bill will be even worse—much worse.... It will revive the reputation of... Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
— William Kristol, "Defeating President Clinton's Healthcare Proposal", December 1993
