Re:Warren Buffett says health care costs are a bigger proble...
by DarkKomunalec on Tuesday May 09, 2017 @10:11AM
(#14300117)
Sounds like as long as they spend some portion of their revenue on R&D, you'll argue inflated drug prices are good and necessary.
Re:Warren Buffett says health care costs are a bigger proble...
by chimeracoder on Tuesday May 09, 2017 @10:17AM
(#14300176)
> Sounds like as long as they spend some portion of their revenue on R&D, you'll argue inflated drug prices are good and necessary.
Again you're looking at the wrong denominator (fraction of spending spent on R&D, rather than fraction of R&D spending that's funded by the US).
Furthermore, I never made any claims about "good and necessary". It looks like you're interested in having a discussion about a different topic altogether, rather than the original statement.
But that's not equivalent to the statement "The US provides the funding for the majority of R&D that the rest of the world benefits from".
If you think that pharmaceutical companies should spend less of their money on R&D, or more on it, that's not really relevant. Whatever research pharmaceutical companies are doing, that's being disproportionately funded by the US market. That's a plainly evident statement; it's right there in their financial sheets.
> You could just as well say the US funds the majority of drug advertising for the entire world
No, because research is a wholly non-excusable good in the global market. Advertising is not.
> they spend more on ads than R&D
Again, not really the point.