Why not do away with patents and IP altogether if the standard is that as soon as someone makes something needed it can be stolen?
Like in software, pretty sure the main expense is R&D.
The real difference between the two sectors is that for medicine, you have a captive audience. People are willing to give up their life savings for certain medical interventions. That same cannot be said for software.
There are, of course, also instances of gouging. But it’s not like these things should inherently cost $20/mo, or whatever, if you want to be able to pay biomedical researchers enough not to go do something else highly compensated like finance/consulting/whatever. Sadly, I had a lot of classmates in engineering school who went that route instead. We urgently need more nuclear reactors, but one of the smartest guys I know, a nuclear engineer, is doing healthcare private equity.
A lot of saas is more like $200+/mo for businesses, and chatgpt might be $20/mo for consumers, but there are companies paying $1m/mo or more for that api.
Personally I'd rather have a system where these kinds of innovations are made and where they eventually become widely available than a system where govt or others forcefully take or force-price an innovation, thus harming future innovations.
laughs in anarchist don’t threaten me with a good time!
We also need to differentiate “theft” (actually taking a tangible thing) from “ripping off” (stealing an idea and making that thing yourself).
Theft is bad (depending in who you steal from and why), ripping off is only bad if you believe current economic models/practices are good. But
I’m only talking about conceptually since this doesn’t account for the consumer’s safety. In practice one downside to unregulated markets is they get exploited by bad actors for profit by making inferior products that harm consumers, unlike regulated markets that get exploited by bad actors for profit through regulatory capture.
The irony that, were it not priced outrageously, it could save the health care industry billions as these people with obesity will otherwise require epesneive treatments if the remain obese.
Why not carve out a new exception for breakthrough drugs that have the potential to add X% to the GDP or save X lives/annum?
This ain’t it though.
"Could" is doing a lot of work there. We don't really know what to expect for these patients 20 or 40 years out.
Long-term outcomes and population-scale polypharmacy risks are not really clear, and won't be for decades.
These drugs enable a valuable intervention for individuals at high risk of health hazards and it's fantastic that they're available, but the perspective changes when you look at outcomes for tens (hundreds?) of millions of people over long spans of time -- there are a lot of inescapable unknowns. One can't actually be sure that the benefits of fast, widespread use will outpace the costs, or at what scale.
Many genuinely effective drugs have gone through exactly this kind of hype cycle only to lead to regret, embarassment, and/or skepticism later on.
Good science, and the good public policy that's informed by it, moves slowly.
A truly harmless weight-loss drug is the white whale of the pharmaceutical (assuming it can be profitable enough to offset the losses that would go along with the decrease in needed treatment for problems ancillary to obesity). These drugs, so far, seem pretty good but some of the side effects should take the shine off for people who thing this is ”The Cure” for obesity.
0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_defects_of_diethylstilbe...
Semaglutide was approved in 2017 and been very widely used (>9 million people). That's been wide & long enough to determine that risks are either exceedingly rare or significantly slow acting.
OTOH the risks and costs of obesity are massive and well known. We're weighing massive known benefits against risks that are either rare (likely less than 1 in a million) or take decades to manifest.