Quote:
Originally Posted by flylock shox
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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There's a couple serious flaws here.
First, you can't ignore international patents without serious repercussions. There's no secret what's in new drugs. They publish what they are, you needn't rediscover them. It's producing them against patent law which is the sticky point.
Second, this already is done with the patent system. Drugs become pennies to the dollar cheaper once patents wear off (approximately 10 years of market exclusivity). Then you rely on generics.
The real issue is still supply and demand, as drug ingredients are a global commodity and you can't just ignore that. This idiot shouldn't change Canada's policy, which works fine at the moment (albeit with some minor exceptions)
To me, we're all barking up the wrong tree. Drugs are a very small part of growing and unsustainable health expenditure. You can't pinch pennies when you're bleeding dollars