Trump Wants Drug Makers, Insurers, & Hospitals To Disclose Prices!

[Dill]

(02-13-2019, 04:27 PM)Benton Wrote: There won't be as much private investment if there isn't profit (patents). That money will go to other gambles. 

If patents continue, then we're just subsiding one more industry. Taxpayers will pay for research, drug companies will cash in on that. In theory prices will go down because more companies will be creating the same drugs.

In theory.

That same theory has the price of most things you buy going up year after year despite reduced costs, more subsidies, and relatively stagnant wages. Hell, look at the auto industry. 

Until there's some kind of price control or massive negotiations on behalf of consumers, prices on drugs will keep rising.

In theory there used to be a division of labor here too, in which taxpayer funding was more clearly demarcated.

The government and universities funded and carried out basic research, the kind that either produces no profit or only would over long term. Corporations generally aren't interested in that, often the government isn't either--so basic research programs, like those into climate change, are precariously funded (in contrast to military research). In both cases, public money, in theory redounded to the public good.

Before 1980, non-profit universities were forbidden to profit from patents or research. The results of such research were ideally to become general knowledge, accessible to all. If universities received federal funding, any patents or inventions resulting therefrom went to the government.

The Bayh-Dole Act (1980) changed all that, allowing universities to own their own patents/inventions and to profit from them. That began the drive of private corporations to invest in universities, and universities seeking corporate funding, blurring the boundary between private and public, profit and non-profit.  In exchange for funding, universities could agree to grant any patents or inventions resulting therefrom to the corporate donor. Thus, corporations did not have to build or update their own labs, so major costs of research could be socialized (in the case of public universities) while profits were privatized.  Further, corporations, especially Big Pharm, could stipulate that research based upon their funding had to include their products. (So Vas is quite right to smell a rat here.)

Reductions in funding of state universities over the last three decades has exacerbated the problem, as neoliberal minded state legislatures seek to "divest" their states of such public expenditures, driving universities to more actively seek other funding sources and themselves adopt profit oriented "business models" of university management.

This confusion between profit and non-profit has been a problem for a long time.  Other factors complicate the picture too, like Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) that combine federal money and direction with corporate resources to produce research entities whose product is controlled by the government while operating outside restrictions and bureaucracy trammeling other government institutions. Sometimes these, and similar university-corporate entities, can separate from their parents and establish themselves as private and for profit.  So publicly funded research sets up a private profit center with no recompense.