... Provided that that "someone" also bears their fair share of the cost of discovery and clinical trials. THAT is the issue here.
The mindset of these companies of treating the poor people as Guinea pigs is also disgusting
671 reported deaths http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/human-rights-pan...
There is no count of no of people who get disabilities but don't die due to trials failing. Who will pay for these? These pharma companies are steered by greed
But if poor Indian patients are going to test these drugs, the GP can certainly argue that poor Indian patients should be able to afford them.
India is one of the biggest hub for most of the pharma's clinical trials due to huge poor population. The rules are lax and they take advantage of it. Lot of people die and many turn paralyzed or disabled permanently due to drug's unknown side-effect.
These corrupt pharma companies want to use India as it's test-bed but want to sell the drugs tested here at an abysmal high price such that it is even out of my reach (even though I am well off).
Anyway the point is moot because R&D costs will probably be paid in the US and other richer markets, India could simply take a free ride. If everyone wanted to do this then you would need to find a way to compensate R&D investments.
Better to just negotiate cleanly with the company for the drug you want, and sell it all on your own market like the NHS does.
Well that's what I meant negotiate a "fair" price that would encourage further investment but you don't overpay - the problem is that unless you have competition/substitutes you can't have market pricing so you need to have a good estimate of "fair" price, eg. say a company comes up with 100% effective HIV cure tomorrow - no competition, nothing comes close, a lot of people would pay gold for that but well over investment/production cost and profit is in many multiples of going rate. You would say "fine" obviously there's a high demand - but the reality is that the demand is inelastic and supply is artificially restricted by a government granted monopoly - reverse engineering costs + production cost would allow a lot lower prices, so you aren't benefiting the consumers (the discovery has already been made) or optimally allocating resources (you have recovered investment/production costs, earned standard profit rate and then some) the thing you earn on top of that is deadweight loss from rent seeking so you need to come up with some metrics to avoid that and also set expectations for investors.
All I'm saying is that if we accept that there is a market failure where you can't recover your investment because you don't have enough advantages on the market (without IP) we should consider compensating the innovator in a way that would stimulate further investment in the area, and when that is the objective you can measure/model what is the minimum profit incentive you need to provide to guarantee acceptable levels of R&D investment.
Get rid of drug patents, bye bye new drugs without direct g'vmt funding. Drugs are trivial to reverse engineer, incredibly expensive to invent.
There is also a massive amount of drugs that go nowhere, often even failing at major trail stage, so the successes pay for the failures.
Our government is fundamentally broken and the source of a good portion of the problems in the health care industry... so let's sprinkle some more government in there!
Seriously, the government has plenty that it can do by providing more transparency in the industry, streamlining and correcting problems in the Patent office and at the FDA, stopping collusion and price fixing, and examining the length of patent-granting-monopolies to ensure that profiteering isn't too far out of whack.
Down-vote me if you like, but I get sick to my stomach when I read sentences like this. If someone is able to deliver and sell the anti-cancer drug by 97% cheaper than you, then in my eyes you have no right to interfere. I am starting to dislike the whole concept of intellectual property and patents and copyright. These are tools of greedy people and bring nothing to the table for the wider audience. No one creates anything just by himself. You are always building on the work of others and merely deriving, combining, changing and mutating it. Whether you do it consciously or unconsciously. It is the principle of cultural evolution and it is why we are where we are. If intellectual property was always practiced the way it is today, I fear we would still be in the Middle Ages.