Human lives are at stake if we screw up the drive to discover new drugs that will save future lives.
Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer-saving drug in the first place. How many lives would you have ended prematurely? Imagine all the new drug research that depends upon Bayer's initial research that will save yet more lives.
Like I said, it's not so cut and dry. The pharmaceutical industry has had quantifiable and demostrable success at a level that is almost unparalleled in history. But your claim is that it's backwards.
I think your statement is inherently backwards. The "reality" is that the pharmaceutical industry produces something that society has found to be extraordinarily valuable. The people I see warping models that don't reflect reality are the ones that disregard the cost of keeping the pharmaceutical rate of discovery going.
I'd love to see improvements to the industry, but "human lives are at stake! It's all backwards!" along with the "senior management should be held accountable" just don't seem to be statements that head is a direction of improvement.
>Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer-saving drug in the first place.
It's distressing that people think that the only possible motivation for inventing life-saving drugs is money.
Lots of people want this and lots of people want to put in the work. Our governments are supposed to be representing us, right? In fact, they are already one of the main contributors to cancer research (http://kcl.academia.edu/RichardSullivan/Papers/263427/Trends...). So why are we leaving it to profit hungry organisations to literally save our lives? If governments do all the research instead then they can all collaborate and share each others' knowledge. That way everyone gets access to everything just by doing their part. It's the open source, creative commons approach to the problem. People can pay a company to do research just so that company can turn around and charge them a fortune or they can pay the equivalent amount in taxes and get cheap product with guaranteed access.
Business is useful for a lot of things but definitely not the basics. They need to be kept simple, cheap and reliable. Only way to achieve that effect is through collaboration, not competition.
>The pharmaceutical industry has had quantifiable and demostrable success
Then I guess our definitions of success differ. To me, success is not in how big their turnover is but what kind of an impact they make on the world and how fairly they treat it. I don't blame anyone for these kinds of actions, their monkey spheres (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html) are full and they can't empathise with the people they affect. They're just reacting to the rules of the game. And that's what's backwards - the game, but we can choose to play a different one.
Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer-saving drug in the first place. How many lives would you have ended prematurely? Imagine all the new drug research that depends upon Bayer's initial research that will save yet more lives.
Like I said, it's not so cut and dry. The pharmaceutical industry has had quantifiable and demostrable success at a level that is almost unparalleled in history. But your claim is that it's backwards.
I think your statement is inherently backwards. The "reality" is that the pharmaceutical industry produces something that society has found to be extraordinarily valuable. The people I see warping models that don't reflect reality are the ones that disregard the cost of keeping the pharmaceutical rate of discovery going.
I'd love to see improvements to the industry, but "human lives are at stake! It's all backwards!" along with the "senior management should be held accountable" just don't seem to be statements that head is a direction of improvement.