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Old 09-23-2015, 06:06 PM   #41
flylock shox
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This whole thing poses such an interesting dilemma.

A private pharmaceutical company should obviously be compensated and allowed to profit from its innovations, but at the same time its market is composed of people in dependent if not desperate circumstances. Obviously you don't want sick people suffering when there's a treatment available, or companies profiteering on the backs of the vulnerable, but at the same time you can't pillage a company for its innovations in a way that discourages or prevents them from having any more.

There's probably a whole slew of different ways to resolve this, it's just a question of what policy would best encourage the company to innovate while at the same time allowing the sick the most access to the benefits of the drug.

I wonder how it would work if the government simply nationalized all pharmaceutical patents after a certain period and then either produced the drugs themselves or issued price-controlled contracts to private companies to do the manufacturing - either way exercising control on the market price and availability of the drug after a certain period of time.

That could result in a situation where the state of (readily available) medicine will always be about, say, 10 years behind the state-of-the-art, which isn't terrible, but which still doesn't resolve the moral issue of life-saving technology being withheld from those with lower incomes.

I find it hard to see how medicine isn't critical national infrastructure, but have a hard time seeing how you nationalize pharmacy without clobbering innovation and development too.

I also have no idea what I'm talking about though.
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