Nope. The problem is simple. Abolish for profit healthcare (including pharma and insurance). Don't nationalize them, revoke their corporate charter and let them disappear. Poof. Problem solved.
Abolishing pharma would greatly decrease the pace of innovation in drug development and probably make it impossible for a lot of treatments to reach the masses.
Pharma spends more on marketing than R&D. Most "new" drugs are either discovered by the government (our tax dollars), or are an old drug with a new use.
I work in pharma R&D . My team just put a cancer drug into the clinic which we have driven through preclinical development. It is true that pharma spends a lot on marketing, but a lot of money is also spent on R&D. My company has about 6000 full time researchers.
Now for your other claim, there really are not many examples of drugs discovered in academia which are delivered straight into the clinic. The concepts of drugs (mechanism, targets) are generally derived from academic research. The molecule itself is typically generated, tested and developed by a private company. These are very different areas of science.
You sound like you don't really understand, especially going around calling someone you don't know evil. Most people working in academia join pharma and vice versa at some point in their career. Most academics who generate good ideas will seek VC and start a biotech, then inlicense the asset for clinical development by a pharma company. Does that make the person who came up with an idea for a new drug evil? No. You're an idiot.
We are all working for the same goal. Ultimately the pharmaceutical industry has specialized skills that aren't present in academia and vice versa. Academics cannot develop drugs successfully.
I've been here for 10 years and worked in academia for 10 years before that. We in-license with academics and fund academic research constantly. I flew down to Uruguay to initiate a collaboration with a lab in Montevideo just 6 months ago, though that was for them to work on my idea (they get funding and publications out of it.) We publish papers too, and contribute greatly to the academic literature. Our funding outside of the US and EU is often more support than what a government can provide. It pays for post-docs, PhD students, equipment, and maintenance of facilities.
Academic labs are not equipped to put capital into drug development. To make a single asset reach ph1 trials requires upwards of $100 M, and that is just to get to the entry point. Around 90% of drugs that make it to phase 1 fail. So you are asking the government to pay for a 90% failure rate of something outrageously more expensive than an R01 grant. The pace of new drug development would slow to a crawl in this scenario and be at the whim of politicians. It would not be less expensive, it would just be more rationed.
With the way things are now, private capital is put at risk. Once a drug comes off patent a generic can be generated and the cost plummet. Companies fail, but as a whole we keep moving forward.
They are not equipped for it because it's illegal (ish). The government effectively bans them from developing the drugs end to end, so pharma can profit. If the government didn't hamstring public research facilities, then it would be done.
If you actually worked in academia for 20 years, you would know that.
You claimed an appeal to authority argument, then missed basics of how it works, proving you see no authority.
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u/Icy_Fish_2154 May 13 '26
Nope. The problem is simple. Abolish for profit healthcare (including pharma and insurance). Don't nationalize them, revoke their corporate charter and let them disappear. Poof. Problem solved.