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Comment by ctlby | Hacker News Reader

Drugs are a complex good created through the intensive efforts of highly intelligent, trained human beings. They are anything but a natural right.

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That is absolutely true, and is also true of clean drinking water, sewage treatment and security of the person. We can choose to make these things available by our common efforts.

That is a bad comparison. It makes no sense to have competition for water. Network effects matter.

Pharma research does not have network effects

And who is going to be in charge of them? Will they not become corrupt? That's a rhetorical question, of course.

When they do get corrupt what do we do, since it's the same guys with the guns and court houses?

Is there clean drinking water in your house? Did you pay insane amounts for it? Do you live in fear of oppression by the water company?

There are some very messed-up public works, but most of the time it works pretty well.

I'm not trying to be rude, but I can't fathom how you can think running a public utility like water treatment and capital intensive research and development are in anyway comparable to each other.

Water works represent an enormous public investment in R&D over hundreds of years. They didn't and don't invent themselves. It's an engineering triumph that they feel so routine.

To return this to drug companies, what you are suggesting is a nationalized manufacturing of drugs, not a nationalized R&D of drugs.

FWIW unlike 90% of this thread, this suggestion doesn't sound insane to me. We could look at the number of people with a disease, and the QALY swing caused by the treatment, and then pay the team which designed the drug for the patent for (expected number of treatments) * (expected gains in QALYs).

This would allow the drugs to be any price the government liked once created, but still convince financially motivated smart people to work in medicine. Bonus points if the solution included ever-rising-prices for long untreated diseases (kind of like an auction).

Water treatment is private where I am. Some places in the country it's (still) government ruled. They are on a regimen every other month it seems. Also the streets turn into rivers when it rains heavily. Oh... and their bills are higher too.

Replace drug with aircraft and few people will say the military should be private.

You can believe that the government should provision military defense and still find laughable the claim that one "deserves" a sophisticated fighter jet flying overhead.

Having a credible level of deturance might not need cutting edge aircraft, but things have progressed past the point where pointed sticks are sufficent so some form of flight capability is required.

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