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Comment by healthenclave | Hacker News Reader

I am just making a general statement and I was not accusing a particular group of people, gov or agency in doing so.

In a fair world we would allocate funds for medical research based on number of people suffering from illness and not their purchasing power -- but then the world isn't truly fair to everyone.

Imagine this were happening inside a country -- a large percentage of population with income below 60K suffered from an particular disease A and a very small chunk of people earning more than 120K suffered from a rare disease B. And everyone including the government decides to fund research on disease B -- won't that be unfair and unjust ??

Also with people shunning vaccines and emerging varied forms of resistance, Disease of the so called "Poor Developing Countries" might come back to haunt the "Rich"

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"In a fair world we would allocate funds for medical research based on number of people suffering from illness and not their purchasing power -- but then the world isn't truly fair to everyone."

Agreed, it's really impossible and on the same shelf as "Perpetual Motion". But, to be fair, when most people these days talk of fairness or just, they mostly refer to their own personal notions of those terms and what physical outcome represents them best. The end result is that the terms are basically meaningless, as no one can reconcile their personal definitions with a global/universal definition (if one even exists).

"[..]And everyone including the government decides to fund research on disease B -- won't that be unfair and unjust ??" I'd say that sucks for the "large percentage" of people you speak for. But, then again, a discussion of this hypothetical scenario would devolve to a discussion of politics, because their government is supposed to represent majority interest. i.e. That's the actual problem.

> In a fair world we would allocate funds for medical research based on number of people suffering from illness and not their purchasing power

Those who can afford it would still set up their own labs and pay their own scientists. There is nothing wrong with that.

But the government should of course do things differently, I agree, which is why the health system including research should be run directly by the state (instead of being funded indirectly via insurance) and patents for pharmaceuticals should not be granted anymore.

Since the big companies involved currently spend most of their money on marketing (again paid for indirectly by insurance), this would also lower the total costs.

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