Medical patents

Posted Apr 22, 2007 18:24 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

""Today it is already the public sector (henceforth called "the government") that pays for the bulk of all drugs that are used in Europe, thanks to various systems for universal medical coverage. (See for example page 37 in this report from EFPIA, The European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.) It is the government that pays for the pharmaceutical research today, by paying high prices to the pharmaceutical companies for patented drugs.""

Haha. Such BS.

The government is the middle men and they get their 10-30% cut off the top of what goes to the people that actually do the work. They are like a leech. Your still dealing with the same orginizations, the same corporations, the same researchers as before. Now you just have the government telling them what to do.

It's not like putting the government in charge is going to get rid of the asshats that are currently screwing stuff up by being greedy. They aren't going to go around and fire execuatives or get rid of the corporations, are they?

It's a misconception that if you just get the government to throw money at a problem it will help it go away. It's similar to a PHB thinking that if they hire twice as many programmers (as well as implimenting a bunch of new rules and hiring more managers to make sure that the old programmers stop being lazy/corrupt) as they do now then the programs will get written twice as fast.

A big step towards solving drug issues is to eliminate the ability for these corporations to do advertising (which is just offensive and completely innapropriate) and also reduce the red tape and eliminating a lot of the liability with getting critical life saving drugs quickly to market.

Posted Apr 27, 2007 19:12 UTC (Fri) by arch_o_median (guest, #44965) [Link]

How about incentives? Bounties on those rogue actors causing us pain. I'm thinking of the X-prize model.
e.g. $100,000,000.00 to the team that delivers Tuberculosis's head on a platter.

Or perhaps more realistically $10,000,000.00 or $1,000,000.00 to the team that achieves significant benchmarks in the quest for the whole enchilada...
I think my tax $ would be relatively well spent this way... and I'd donate to charities that pursued this strategy.