> On Medicaid and have HER+ breast cancer? Tough, you can take some horrible chemotherapy that will give you 6 months, not the new HER2 drugs that will give you 5+ years of life.
Which is exactly how it should work. The government should allow limited monopolies as an incentive for innovation, but it shouldn't be subsidizing them with taxpayer dollars.
The vast majority of new drugs have few if any benefits over existing drugs, they're just government handouts to the wealthy. So I fail to see how a system that provided the best possible treatments for 99% of health problems for every American at a fraction of the current cost wouldn't be vastly better than our current system.
So I fail to see how a system that provided the best possible treatments for 99% of health problems for every American at a fraction of the current cost wouldn't be vastly better than our current system.
If you're excluding patented drugs, you're excluding some of the best possible treatments out there.
Also, your statement that "the vast majority of new drugs have few if any benefits over existing drugs" is not true. Some drugs are not any better, but most are better, although many only slightly.
You have to realize that similar to tech, not every new drug can be a breakthrough. Most new drugs have incremental benefit, but it expands the boundaries of what's possible. If you look at the treatment of colon cancer, each new drug only added a few months of life, but after 10 years, the benefit had extended to over 5 years.
> If you're excluding patented drugs, you're excluding some of the best possible treatments out there.
The issue is that allocating taxpayer dollars to the best treatments is bad policy, if you can get better outcomes from worse treatments for the same amount of dollars. E.g. for most diseases the most effective treatments are probably alternative medicine, but it's also probably not cost effective for the government to be paying for everyone to get whatever alternative medicine they want.
Many of the "best possible treatments" are expensive crap, barely better than a cheap generic or even than no treatment at all (especially cancer treatments).
Which is exactly how it should work. The government should allow limited monopolies as an incentive for innovation, but it shouldn't be subsidizing them with taxpayer dollars.
The vast majority of new drugs have few if any benefits over existing drugs, they're just government handouts to the wealthy. So I fail to see how a system that provided the best possible treatments for 99% of health problems for every American at a fraction of the current cost wouldn't be vastly better than our current system.