Originally posted by WellCookedFetus
Pay for development with production grants!!! production grants have given the USofA the best most advanced military force there is. And yes today other countiers are chruning out reseach results as fast as we are. Also think about how much of your insurance money goes just keeping those CEOs rich.
What does the might of the US military have to do with medicine? I admit that production grants could be used to subsidize some of the costs in principle, but what kind of spending are you projecting? How would this be accomplished? Would they cover phase I, II and III clinical trials? Formulation? Toxicology? Insurance? Who would administer it? How would candidate drugs get chosen? Will they do trials on children, or just adults? Who would market them?
Socialized medicine does not equal the government developing drugs. Socialized medicine is the government handing out the drugs. Big pharma (or someone) must still make the drugs. Those drugs will only get made if there is a profit to be made in that drug. Now, I do not necessarily agree that that is the best system, but it is what we have. If you want to change it, first answer my questions above. Socialized medicine may (as may health cooperatives including insurance companies) be in a position to influence in a small way what prices the companies can charge for drugs, but if you look at the furrough over AIDS drugs, you will see that it is not that great. The companies will grant some small concessions, but in the end are there to make money. If they cannot make money, they will not develop drugs.
Universities are not in a position to make, test and market new drugs. Some may be working towards that, and it is an admirable goal, but will take decades to get anywhere near where the big pharma are. So until that time, my insurance/medicare/NHS fees will go to that fat cat. What happens at the moment is that discoveries in the lab get licenced to pharma, in the hope that some of the monies made can trickle back to the basic science labs.
Further (to get back on thread) - cancer is not one disease. What works for one form of cancer will probably not work for another form of cancer. Thus, one drug will not combat all forms of cancer. Even further, the apparently same cancer (from a clinical perspective) can have several different molecular basis. Again - no one drug will work.
But again - how much money are big pharma making by NOT selling a drug? It was alledged that they have a universal panacea waiting in their back pocket. If that was truly the case, they would be marketting it vigorously NOW. The Hospitals and Doctors are the ones making money from the sick now (i.e. their CEOs are getting rich - now that is a argument for socialized medicine), not the pharma companies.
