The bigger issue is the financing model that causes innovation to happen in all the wrong fields, but that is a different question and very complex.

Aside from the military[1], in what other categories of product do those waving that banner support mandatory payments to private entities supporting their preferred agenda[2]?

Never mind that the military is the best comparison to drugs in terms of regulation - the only products less "free-market" in the US than drugs are military weapons. In a way, there's a funny symmetry there.

[1] A huge amount of that money goes directly to private firms, just like pharma payments.

[2] Well, I guess one can opt out of medical care.

Pfizer opened their Sandwich site in 1954 and when they closed it in 2011 it wasn't because of the NHS.

Of the 252 drugs approved from '97 to '05... 58% from pharmaceutical companies, 18% from biotech companies, 16% from universities, transferred to biotech 8% from universities, transferred to pharma

Second of all, discovering a drug gets you about 1/4 of the way to an approved, marketed drug. Typically the breakdown between research and development costs are 1/3 and 2/3. No academic institutions do the development part, where most of the cost is.

[1]http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/11/04/whe...

I want to know how the R&D looks for compound group discovery. Everything else is just repackaging with a chemistry kit.

118 of the drugs during this period were considered to have scientific novelty (46%), and of those: 44% were from pharmaceutical companies. 25% were from biotech companies, and 31% were from universities (transferred to either biotech or pharma)

Of the 118 scientifically novel drugs (new MOA, etc), 69% were NOT from academia. That is, academia has zero to do with the discovery all the way up to the approval of the drug.

Please don't insult our intelligence.The context for this discussion is about greedy companies using existing research for free and contributing nothing back. The linked article doesn't show which scientific research contributed to the product development. Universities are not all primarily engaged in drug discovery.

Now, if you'd like to claim that that discovery was based on science paid for by the gov't, I won't disagree, but continuing that line of thought we could claim that drug companies are greedy because they are taking advantage of organic chemists who did work 200 years ago.

>No academic institutions do the development part, where most of the cost is.

Because they got for free all of the decades of scientific research.

Yes, the scientific research that cost maybe 1% of the total cost of bringing the drug to market. Makes sense that the company should share some of the wealth.

I definitely disagree here. There has been plenty of basic science discovered at private companies. I do agree they are hesitant to share it, but that's doesn't mean it doesn't happen. A great example of the Upjohn dihydroxylation reaction. Discovered at Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, freely disseminated through journal publications and now a key technology in organic synthesis.

I'm not sure they "should", at least from a financial standpoint. The ACA basically put a cap on insurance company profits, as a percentage. It's not phrased quite that way, but it's the upshot (look up "medical loss ratio"). This is the worst provision I know of in the ACA, because it sounds like a nice idea, but if you think it through, it actually disincentivizes insurance companies from doing what they can to lower costs.

It basically says that the maximum amount that insurance companies can keep is 20% of premiums (assuming no administrative cost or other overhead). Say the average cost per person is $4000 / year, so the average premium is $5000 / year; they're able to make a $1000 profit, or 20% of the premium. Now suppose the insurance company negotiates costs down to $3000 per year. Well, the maximum premium they can charge now is $3750, so they lose 25% of their profit. On the other hand, if they sit by and let costs skyrocket to $6000, they can raise premiums to $7500, and make $1500 in profit.

Now, of course insurance companies also compete on their premiums, so in theory, they still have some incentive to negotiate lower costs. But it seems like that must be seriously mitigated by the profit cap.

I'm not an expert on this by any means, so if someone who is wants to set me straight, I'd love to hear it. But I'm just very confused as to why this provision was thought to be a good idea.

You expect the masses to think one step further, which will not happen on enough scale.