No. of Recommendations: 2
I read a paper that argued out that drug patents might not be a good idea in the US. ... it would be much cheaper for the government to pay for all the R&D and have no drug patents at all. This would also remove the bias towards research on diseases of rich people who can pay a lot for a drug relative to research targeted solely based on the biggest aggregate disease burden.
This is a great idea. I'm surprised I've never heard it discussed before.
US healthcare coverage is an expensive kludge. The easiest way forward is through incremental reform: building on ObamaCare and Medicaid to extend coverage to all legal residents, while hacking away at some of the more obvious inefficiencies in the system, like expanding the ability of Medicare to negotiate the prices of drugs. But, that will still leave us with an expensive kludge of a system.
It'd be dreamy to elect a President and Congress with the mandate and will to make a cohesive national system so we could capture the ~50% savings and improved results that most other advanced countries get.
