[ExI] Health care in the USA

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/6/29 Mirco Romanato <painlord2k at libero.it>:

> What matter to the consumer is that new, better drugs arrive to the
> shelf to be sold. How they arrive is not their concern.
> How many new drugs went in commerce with government funded or no-prodit
> funded research? I would say none in the last few years or decades. The
> reason is simple, no government and no no-profit organization is willing
> to pay around 1 billion of US$ for a single drugs to hit the shelves and
> wait 10 years for a result.

In general, scientific institutions do the basic research and train
the PhD students, because the private sector won't. So in this sense
almost every drug is funded by government or non-profit money, since
without this research there would be no science. The basic science
being done today will give rise to the as yet unimagined technologies
of the future - but only a tiny part of it, and no-one knows what part
that will be.

It's of course to be expected that corporations only choose to develop
the more financially promising research leads, but it has to be
acknowledged where the science comes from.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou