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Most pharma research is already done by universities and other government subsidized organizations.

Most of the drug development costs come from the byzantine approval and regulatory process.

And for the government to pay for it by going around granting monopolies to private institutions is a very inefficient and plain insidious way of doing things, as can be seen with how new drugs are just old drugs with the smallest possible change to grant a new patent which come out exactly when the old patent expires, and many other ways big pharma exploits the system to create a oligopoly.

And this is not any grand conspiracy, is the natural result of regulatory capture and the incentives created by the patent system.




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