Say Anything Blog

Actually pharmaceutical companies have very little interest in finding cures.  They have an interest in finding treatments which will keep sick people buying their drugs for years and decades.  That is why the government should subsidize scientist at Universities and nonprofits to find cures.  They are the only ones that will.

I don’t actually think that’s true, Lestat.  Drug companies compete like any other industry, and they have an interest in making people feel better...not just marginally better off than they were before.

I think yours is a baseless accusation, though I’d certainly be open to hearing some support for your theory.

Of course, I do agree that government has a role to play in funding and facilitating research.  How extensive that role should be, of course, is a matter we could debate about as well.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

Rob’s recently listened-to songs:

Lestat, you are like some kind of parody of a mush-headed leftist.

The idea that a company like Pfizer would turn down the hundreds of billions they could earn for, say, a cure for cancer to instead keep their customers sick is just pathetically moronic.

Drug companies absolutely find cures.  Things like Prozac and Zocor and Lipotur and so on cannot cure depression, heart disease, etc.  There is no magic pill for these things.  But there are cures for bacterial infections.  They are called antibiotics.  There are close to cures for HIV with rhetrovirus inhibitors.  There are treatments for all kinds of illnesses.

I am not a fan of funding colleges and universities with block grants for most forms of research.  The problem is that government tends to fund the wrong kind of research.  Take for instance HIV funding.  Why is it that only 33M people world wide have the HIV virus, yet it gets 4x as much funding as cancer?  And why is it that certain forms of cancer get far more funding than other more common kinds simply because some celebrity says it needs it or some ad campaign comes out and convinces Congress to throw money at it?  Why is it that states throw billions of dollars at Fetal Stem Cell research, when adult stem cell research is far more lucrative in terms of actually finding cures?

It is true that pharmaceutical companies are driven by profit motive.  But their profit motive is derived by creating lucritive drugs.  Academia is driven by profit motive too, but their profit motive is not about results so much as it is about securing the next research grant or writing the next paper to advance the university or the doctor’s career.  When private funds are invested into R&D, the results are far better than when government funds are given to academics to “research” things.  But that is generally the case in all things--the market is far better than government at fixing problems.

I assume that Lestat, like the Dems and probably Huck and McCain, wants the government to tax the shit out of pharmaceutical companies profits, then reallocate the money back to universities to do r&d.  Then he wants price caps on what companies can charge for drugs.