It's a particularly touchy subject because it involves people's health and the ability/inability to pay for it.
But as a sufferer of a debilitating disease with a miracle drug that costs an arm and a leg, I've become a convert to the US pharma-industrial complex. These drugs take billions of dollars and decades to research--that funding/development isn't going to happen without venture capitalists who shoulder that risk for the profit reward. An equal number of pharma venture capitalists lose all their money, researching dead-end drugs.
I'm incredibly blessed to have both a cure invented during my lifetime and the means to pay for it. But even if I lacked the means, I would still infinitely prefer a world where a cure exists that I need to somehow access, as opposed to a hopeless world with no cure.
It feels like there's a lack of imagination here. Could you conceive of a world that was successful in its research of drugs, but was propped up by an economic model other than pharma venture capitalism?
Freedom of choice means you have the right to try to create such a system. As other people can try what they want, VC funding, astrology, etc. It's all legal and competes.
But, if someone is selling a system which doesn't exist yet, but is supposed to be better, but that will only work if we also shut off the one working system first, before knowing... well, I'm skeptical.
It's a particularly touchy subject because it involves people's health and the ability/inability to pay for it.
But as a sufferer of a debilitating disease with a miracle drug that costs an arm and a leg, I've become a convert to the US pharma-industrial complex. These drugs take billions of dollars and decades to research--that funding/development isn't going to happen without venture capitalists who shoulder that risk for the profit reward. An equal number of pharma venture capitalists lose all their money, researching dead-end drugs.
I'm incredibly blessed to have both a cure invented during my lifetime and the means to pay for it. But even if I lacked the means, I would still infinitely prefer a world where a cure exists that I need to somehow access, as opposed to a hopeless world with no cure.