The money health insurance currently pays to pharma companies. It might not be more efficient than the current model (but maybe it is, I'm not very knowledgeable about the current process), but I think it would be fairer.

It might also have the side effect that we'd get more drugs that are currently not produced because it wouldn't profitable (eg antibiotics) and fewer drugs with dubious efficacy that are very profitable (eg anti-depressants).

That's a good point, more relevant to the US than RoW, but still a good point. The main issue is that you run into a chicken/egg problem: to lower the cost the government needs to develop alternative drugs, but won't have the money to do so unless you lower the cost.

This sort of logic does not really work for drugs or even for science. Business processes like management, cost cutting, harassment, implicit and explicit threats, don't really produce better or more accurate results. Or lead to cures or drugs faster. Usually you have a single star scientist with his team working his ass off to get to an understanding or cure, and he or she is not usually doing it for money. Business does not really work with science, it corrupts science and forces an unnatural order on it which we pay for as a society.

You're going to have to prove that dramatic claim.

I say that business works extraordinarily well with science and is superior to eg government research by a great margin. As proven by Bell Labs, IBM research, Xerox PARC, Microsoft research, Google, Lockheed, Apple, Shockley, Intel, Fairchild, Samsung, Cisco, Texas Instruments, Boeing, Pfizer, Merck, Amgen, Gilead, Genentech, Standard Oil (one of the first highly successful commercial research labs), and thousands of other corporations. Even if those companies didn't always capitalize on their research, they produced tremendous science. The technology lead the US has enjoyed for most of a century proves this fact, as it is heavily (not solely) derived from the scientific output of its corporations.

The US became by far the world leader on pharma and biotech specifically because a business, profit-seeking approach to those industries produces a dramatically greater outcome in terms of innovation.

If that weren't the case, the US would be dead last in pharma and biotech over the last 50 years, given its market approach.

It works well to commercialize existing knowledge, or take some existing knowledge that is 80% complete and then do the other 20%. Business is good as capturing value, not at creating it. In terms of technology it's much the same, the people who created the knowledge often did not benefit from it... someone else did. The ones who did benefit were scientists first in usually a university environment who then sought to commercialize their inventions and formed corporations to do that. Businesses often do not discover these things they commercialized, and maybe it's right to say that some things may not have been as profitable if not for business. And maybe some things would not have been properly commercialized.

Again, you'll need some very good sources to back that up. There are far too many bold and controversial claims, until then, that's just like, your opinion man.

Well in the name of freedom anyone can and should be able to do science. And anyone may legitimately come up with a cure. But seldom do we see that happen. Instead we usually see incremental progress on existing knowledge, which is then used to do regulatory capture of some given drug. Do governments distort science less, well they don't partake in this sort of scientific charade as profit motivated corporations do. They also don't have any incentive to push drugs for massive profit that they know don't work that well or cause certain side-effects.

But politicians have massive other incentives: supporting their ideology, religious beliefs, power structures, etc.

Between someone motivated purely by profit, and a politician, I trust the profit-driven person far more. Their intentions are completely clear unlike a politician's.

When it comes to supporting science they have only two choices, to fund it or not to fund it. So distortions would only come from them not funding something. The other stuff, I don't know how it applies to science funding. In case of not funding, I think there is enough spectrum of thought between liberals and conservatives to cover funding most causes if possible.

No, there's the decision of what to fund, and who to fund in each field. You could easily fund a group with anti-GMO views, or fund a group with pro-GMO views.

It gets even trickier when you add global warming, abortion, mental health, etc. into the options.