Re:Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor
by wpietri on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @01:15AM
(#25642716)
I'm fine with that. Funding drugs based on profit potential is hugely distorting. E.g., Oxycontin. Or the whole pharmaceutical sales and promotion apparatus. Or the way it's much easier to fund something that mitigates a problem instead of curing it.
We could publicly fund pharmaceutical research. Indeed, I suspect we'd be better off publicly funding it on cost terms alone. Global pharma research was $186 billion in 2019. [1] The US spends over $100 billion more on drugs compared with other countries' per-capita spending. [2] The current opioid crisis costs nearly $80 billion/year, [3] and was kicked off by a prescription opioid boom [4] driven by the promotion of Oxycontin. [5]
We could publicly fund pharmaceutical research. Indeed, I suspect we'd be better off publicly funding it on cost terms alone. Global pharma research was $186 billion in 2019. [1] The US spends over $100 billion more on drugs compared with other countries' per-capita spending. [2] The current opioid crisis costs nearly $80 billion/year, [3] and was kicked off by a prescription opioid boom [4] driven by the promotion of Oxycontin. [5]
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/309471/randd-spending-sh...
[2] https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-...
[3] https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics/opioids/opioid-overdos...
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/