SeanEdwards
Member
- Joined
- May 21, 2007
- Messages
- 4,407
I thought it would be interesting to discuss situations where the actions of the free market do not work well at meeting the needs of consumers.
One area where I think the market is not so good is in medicine, and in particular in the development of cures for illness/disease. Just today, I sat through a presentation by a researcher from Amgen, where he discussed the drug discovery/development process. The current process requires these drug companies to spend anywhere from 7-15 years, identifying, testing, and getting FDA approval before they can bring a drug to market. It can cost up to $1.5 billion in this development process before a single dollar can be earned form sales.
These financial pressures tend to make drugs that treat and control symptoms vastly more attactive to drug companies than drugs that cure an underlying disease. The holy grail for these researchers is a drug that must be taken daily for the rest of the patients life. I can imagine a circumstance where one of these companies would actually bury a drug that cured or prevented cancer, in favor of drugs that just check the growth of a tumor. The market simply does not reward them for developing cures. In fact it penalizes them, by eliminating the disease that they could otherwise get rich from by making drugs that treat symptoms.
This situation is very noticeable in the development of vaccines. Relatively few drug companies are searching for vaccines, even though vaccines are some of the most effective products ever discovered for preventing illness.
More generally, these market pressures are at work in medicine as well. Doctors are treated for "fixing" problems. They don't get paid if you stay healthy. This seems like a perverse outcome that is not in the interest of consumers. A pill that could prevent heart disease for a lifetime with one dose sounds pretty damn good to me, but to the medical industry it would be a disaster.
This is not a plea for socialized medicine, so all you anarcho-capitalist zealots can just enjoy a big steaming cup of STFU before even getting started. This thread is meant to spark a discussion about ways that these flaws in the market system can be mitigated.
One possibility that occured to me, was perhaps creating a new type of patent law that grants the inventor of a cure an extra-long patent on their discovery. This would be an incentive to encourage drug developers to spend the money researching vaccines and other medications that permanently cure illness. Right now, the patent law gives a company 22 years of patent rights (I think). And usually these drug companies patent their drug molecule long before it's ever approved by the FDA as a way to protect their intellectual property. Then of course they burn up a bunch of their protected patent period trying to get the drug approved for use. This in turn tends to drive up the price of the drugs when they hit the marketplace, because companies have less patent protection time to recoup their investment and start profitting.
One area where I think the market is not so good is in medicine, and in particular in the development of cures for illness/disease. Just today, I sat through a presentation by a researcher from Amgen, where he discussed the drug discovery/development process. The current process requires these drug companies to spend anywhere from 7-15 years, identifying, testing, and getting FDA approval before they can bring a drug to market. It can cost up to $1.5 billion in this development process before a single dollar can be earned form sales.
These financial pressures tend to make drugs that treat and control symptoms vastly more attactive to drug companies than drugs that cure an underlying disease. The holy grail for these researchers is a drug that must be taken daily for the rest of the patients life. I can imagine a circumstance where one of these companies would actually bury a drug that cured or prevented cancer, in favor of drugs that just check the growth of a tumor. The market simply does not reward them for developing cures. In fact it penalizes them, by eliminating the disease that they could otherwise get rich from by making drugs that treat symptoms.
This situation is very noticeable in the development of vaccines. Relatively few drug companies are searching for vaccines, even though vaccines are some of the most effective products ever discovered for preventing illness.
More generally, these market pressures are at work in medicine as well. Doctors are treated for "fixing" problems. They don't get paid if you stay healthy. This seems like a perverse outcome that is not in the interest of consumers. A pill that could prevent heart disease for a lifetime with one dose sounds pretty damn good to me, but to the medical industry it would be a disaster.
This is not a plea for socialized medicine, so all you anarcho-capitalist zealots can just enjoy a big steaming cup of STFU before even getting started. This thread is meant to spark a discussion about ways that these flaws in the market system can be mitigated.
One possibility that occured to me, was perhaps creating a new type of patent law that grants the inventor of a cure an extra-long patent on their discovery. This would be an incentive to encourage drug developers to spend the money researching vaccines and other medications that permanently cure illness. Right now, the patent law gives a company 22 years of patent rights (I think). And usually these drug companies patent their drug molecule long before it's ever approved by the FDA as a way to protect their intellectual property. Then of course they burn up a bunch of their protected patent period trying to get the drug approved for use. This in turn tends to drive up the price of the drugs when they hit the marketplace, because companies have less patent protection time to recoup their investment and start profitting.
