The drugs might end up being cheaper, but there will be much less research for drugs (aka less drugs in the future). Greed is a good motivator.
There is a big danger in the approach I gave, but it's political interference. If the god-botherers can be forced to keep their mitts off, I expect my way would create more basic research and more simple effective drugs.
Greed motivates chasing the slight change that will let your company replace an ageing-out-of-patent drug with a freshly patented one, drugs for rich people, drugs aimed at insurance payers, and it de-motivates improving the basics.
I see those as an adverse outcomes, so I would prefer a different way of funding drug development.
"The Benefits and Savings of Publicly-Funded Clinical Trials of Prescription Drugs"
http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/the-benefits-and-sa...
"Patent Monopolies and the Costs of Mismarketing Drugs"
http://www.cepr.net/publications/reports/patent-monopolies-a...
And that doesn't include the tens of billions in biotech VC funding.
But my view might be myoptic, so I was double-checking.
The last number I saw was $6B invested in 2014.[1]
[1]https://www.pwc.com/us/en/technology/assets/pwc-life-science...
Eli Lilly, for example, spent ~$4.5 billion on R&D in FY 2014 (24% of their total revenue) - http://www.lilly.com/about/key-facts/Pages/key-facts.aspx ... I'm not sure how big the VC deals were for 2014, but I feel like if you include Pfizer, Genentech, 3M, GSK, and then all the smaller ones big enough to be listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_compani..., VC funding will be maybe 2-5% of the total private pharma spend.
This is actually a lot like what Intel, Nvidia, and Google do. Basically your revenue takes over where the VCs left off. If the VCs are doing their jobs correctly, reinvested profit R&D is in aggregate much higher than VC dollars... Intel spent $3 billion last year on R&D for example... https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense
Perhaps I am simply stating a tautology b/c of the narrow definition, but I'm on the same page with refurb.
This process can be short circuited by an acquisition, but of course the acquisition is ultimately paid for by past customer profits too.
In the context of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10251676 's assertion that "Drug creation needs to be nationalized, 100% tax funded all the way from researcher to trials to manufacture, and the drugs sold at cost thereafter" which was followed by brixton's reply that "The drugs might end up being cheaper, but there will be much less research for drugs" this remains a very important point: drug R&D folk aren't in it for the VC funding... they're in it for the profit margin. If you remove that light at the end of the tunnel, there are no startups, and the smartest of us go work for the Googles of this world.
(Though FWIW I do think you, refurb, and I are all roughly on the same page if we limit our scope to startups.)
The error in your thinking is that curing a patient results in less money than just chronically treating one. Not so!
Come again? Please explain how that works.
Imagine the kudos that would go to the researchers and the company that cured the common cold! And a pill for that would sell well enough to offset the losses from palliative lozenges, decongestants, etc. And it's not like they are short of other pills to sell.
The article pointed out that the drug in question is over 60 years old. I doubt the original creators thought about profitability at a time frame where they are most probably dead anyway.
Poor people have been voting for Democrats for 50 years and they're still poor.
Getting people out of poverty is a lot more complicated than which political party one supports.
A Mayor can put together a deal that will bring an employer(and all of the jobs that it brings along) to a municipality, congress doesn't do that.
A Governor can influence the business climate of a state. There's a reason why manufacturing jobs are moving to southern states.
Greed in here can also be a cause for the tragedy of the commons, which is more serious than any opportunity progress! Because of the said greed the drugs reached agriculture having all kinds of unintended effects, the most serious of which being development of many drug-resistant pathogens.