I don’t suffer if I have an antibiotic resistent infection and a company sells a drug to cure it at market price. I suffer if I have an antibiotic resistent infection and there’s no drug available that cures my illness and I die.
You need a lot of ideology to the conclusion that the act of someone selling me a drug that prevents me from dying at market prices makes me suffer.
I have to point out that in my last comment I specifically said that negotiating with the private company is the correct choice when the alternative is mass deaths due to the lack of antibiotics. We agree on “death due to infection is worse of having to pay market prices plus public money for development”.
It’s just that I believe “using public moneys to develop X as a private resource” it’s a worse long-term strategy for keeping society supplied of Xs than “use public moneys to develop X as a public resource”, and I’m really not understanding why you assume there is no possible third alternative where I suffer even less because I only have to pay market prices or the costs of development, and not both. (I’m also fine with short term hybrid solutions such as “government pays half of X development costs, private agrees to keep prices at an agreed value to ensure X is easily accessible”, I guess).
Since you accused me twice of coming from a biased and strongly ideological viewpoints while I sticked with practical considerations and arguments, citing no kind of rhetoric or anti-capitalistic moral to justify my position, I start to feel like I’m not the one bringing ideology into this argument.
Corporations are a lot better at cutting of wasteful research that doesn’t make proftis then government research labs are
Corporations are way too good at cutting any research that doesn’t make the most profits. This is a huge problem for research and science, because anything that might lead to huge public benefits and breakthroughs but needs 20 years of expensive research gets ignored and cut.
Also, you focus research on what gets you profit rather than generating utility for mankind.
The fact that free market driven enterprise is much effective then government run programs.
Can you link me any data on this? I had saw research in different textbooks that said that public service was actually matching private enterprise for quality/costs of service in stuff like healthcare, water, light and other commodities, and in retirement investment plans. I’ll try to recover it and link it since I’ll need to write something on this, but I have to locate it first. Or you were referring to other types of programs?
The idea that lifesaving medince doesn’t help population welfare seems very strange to me. Having more corporations that develop medicine for conditions that previously couldn’t be treated as well clearly improve welfare.
The key issue is that economic growth stops correlating too much to the development of lifesaving medicine after a certain point, and stops correlating to the access of the public to lifesaving medicine even faster.
Wealth distribution, instead, correlates with access to such lifesaving medicine a lot more. The population suffers not because there is no lifesaving medicine to be bought, but because the market price of lifesaving medicine can be unreasonably high and still be the one which generates the most profits.
I’m not managing to find accurate informations of how much antibiotics cost in the US, it seems to be twice or three times what they cost in Europe, and they still seem to be one of the cheap drugs, as I expected (I remember having bought Ofloxacin for 27€, here it’s listed at 80$). Anyway, all the sources I found seem to agree that prescription drugs in the US are basically the most expensive in the world, and by a lot. https://cddep.org/tool/current_prices_antibiotics_class_age/
Companies likely wouldn’t scalp too much on flashy stuff like the antibiotic needed to save the population from flesh eating bacterias due to getting bad press, but poor people in need of “boring less-flashy lifesaving medicines” are currently haiving to make the choice between having medicine or having a roof (If I understand correctly insulin is sold in the US 700$ a dose?).
Corporations can develop all the lifesaving medicines they want, if the optimal profit solution is to sell them at a price only 40% of the population can afford, you won’t nearly see as much benefits for the population than in a system that treats health as a public resource and sets prices to what everyone can afford.
So to link back with
I don’t suffer if I have an antibiotic resistent infection and a company sells a drug to cure it at market price. I suffer if I have an antibiotic resistent infection and there’s no drug available that cures my illness and I die.
You suffer if you have to choose between losing your home/sinking into debt/renouncing lots of things needed for health to afford treatment for the antibiotic resistant infection (which, money wise, actually seems one of the best health problem you can get).
As a society we want developing new drugs to be more profitable then laying of researchers and doing stock buybacks because better medicine is one of the ways we can actually translate increased societal wealth into increased population welfare
This seems like the most expensive way to get new drugs ever. I have to make it so that developing new drugs is one of the most profitable things a company can do with its moneys? Either you pay as a society many times what you’d pay to develop it yourself (remember, you’re paying twice already, first to cover costs with public moneys, second to buy it at market price as a population), or you systematically sink and ban all other things a corporation can do, which I don’t believe would really be a good idea.
Maximising profit isn’t an utility function that can be expected to be efficient at providing utility to the general population. It’s an utility function that doesn’t have public health at all in its parameters.
What kind of unlikely coincidence is needed to make so that maximising profit ends up, by basically mere chance, to also improve public health more than a system with as utility function to actually improve public health?
I have to point out that in my last comment I specifically said that negotiating with the private company is the correct choice when the alternative is mass deaths due to the lack of antibiotics. We agree on “death due to infection is worse of having to pay market prices plus public money for development”.
It’s just that I believe “using public moneys to develop X as a private resource” it’s a worse long-term strategy for keeping society supplied of Xs than “use public moneys to develop X as a public resource”, and I’m really not understanding why you assume there is no possible third alternative where I suffer even less because I only have to pay market prices or the costs of development, and not both. (I’m also fine with short term hybrid solutions such as “government pays half of X development costs, private agrees to keep prices at an agreed value to ensure X is easily accessible”, I guess).
Since you accused me twice of coming from a biased and strongly ideological viewpoints while I sticked with practical considerations and arguments, citing no kind of rhetoric or anti-capitalistic moral to justify my position, I start to feel like I’m not the one bringing ideology into this argument.
Corporations are way too good at cutting any research that doesn’t make the most profits. This is a huge problem for research and science, because anything that might lead to huge public benefits and breakthroughs but needs 20 years of expensive research gets ignored and cut.
Also, you focus research on what gets you profit rather than generating utility for mankind.
Can you link me any data on this? I had saw research in different textbooks that said that public service was actually matching private enterprise for quality/costs of service in stuff like healthcare, water, light and other commodities, and in retirement investment plans. I’ll try to recover it and link it since I’ll need to write something on this, but I have to locate it first. Or you were referring to other types of programs?
The key issue is that economic growth stops correlating too much to the development of lifesaving medicine after a certain point, and stops correlating to the access of the public to lifesaving medicine even faster.
Wealth distribution, instead, correlates with access to such lifesaving medicine a lot more. The population suffers not because there is no lifesaving medicine to be bought, but because the market price of lifesaving medicine can be unreasonably high and still be the one which generates the most profits.
I’m not managing to find accurate informations of how much antibiotics cost in the US, it seems to be twice or three times what they cost in Europe, and they still seem to be one of the cheap drugs, as I expected (I remember having bought Ofloxacin for 27€, here it’s listed at 80$). Anyway, all the sources I found seem to agree that prescription drugs in the US are basically the most expensive in the world, and by a lot. https://cddep.org/tool/current_prices_antibiotics_class_age/
Companies likely wouldn’t scalp too much on flashy stuff like the antibiotic needed to save the population from flesh eating bacterias due to getting bad press, but poor people in need of “boring less-flashy lifesaving medicines” are currently haiving to make the choice between having medicine or having a roof (If I understand correctly insulin is sold in the US 700$ a dose?).
Corporations can develop all the lifesaving medicines they want, if the optimal profit solution is to sell them at a price only 40% of the population can afford, you won’t nearly see as much benefits for the population than in a system that treats health as a public resource and sets prices to what everyone can afford.
So to link back with
You suffer if you have to choose between losing your home/sinking into debt/renouncing lots of things needed for health to afford treatment for the antibiotic resistant infection (which, money wise, actually seems one of the best health problem you can get).
This seems like the most expensive way to get new drugs ever. I have to make it so that developing new drugs is one of the most profitable things a company can do with its moneys? Either you pay as a society many times what you’d pay to develop it yourself (remember, you’re paying twice already, first to cover costs with public moneys, second to buy it at market price as a population), or you systematically sink and ban all other things a corporation can do, which I don’t believe would really be a good idea.
Maximising profit isn’t an utility function that can be expected to be efficient at providing utility to the general population. It’s an utility function that doesn’t have public health at all in its parameters.
What kind of unlikely coincidence is needed to make so that maximising profit ends up, by basically mere chance, to also improve public health more than a system with as utility function to actually improve public health?