Seeing you say that, I decided to stop a second and do the maths. With this page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth … and the estimate that there are 600 total american billionaires, I ballpark their combined net worth as being 3.5 trillion...
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Replying to @hamish_todd @Jonathan_Blow and
And Medicare for All, for example, would be ~$30T over the next 10 years. You’d need more billionaires.
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Replying to @bentruyman @hamish_todd and
I didn't do the math. But how the fuck a poor country like Brazil can do decent public and great, cheap private healthcare? And in the USA it's literally impossible? I mean, I get it, economy is not easy and trivial solutions don't work. But saying this wouldn't work is weird.
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Replying to @sohakes @bentruyman and
Because the actual problem is the healthcare sector is "overpaid", meaning it takes way more money to run it than it should. It has nothing to do with billionaires, but it's easier to claim that than to point out that the "medical industrial complex" is a disaster.
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Replying to @cmuratori @sohakes and
Personally, I think healthcare in the US could be fixed almost overnight by simply enacting some laws designed to foster competition in healthcare. Instead, nearly 100% of our healthcare laws are designed to prevent it (patents, licensing, liability, etc.)
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Replying to @cmuratori @sohakes and
Patents are the current method of creating a financial incentive to create new drugs. It is very plausible to me that they could be replaced with something else like government bounties, but that couldn't be done overnight.
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Replying to @hamish_todd @sohakes and
That is the theory, but the more I've looked at the "create new drugs" industry, the more it looks a lot like patents on the measure may actually cause less new drugs to be created than more.
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Replying to @cmuratori @hamish_todd and
New prescription drugs cost ~$2.7bn to develop. It seems like the solution would need to include minimizing that number as much as possible, especially in the context of patent reform.
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Replying to @bentruyman @hamish_todd and
It is also a massive problem regarding what drugs get developed and produced, because when the cost is $3bln, that eliminates any chance someone will refine a drug that can't really be patented, as well as making it unlikely anyone will produce niche drugs or one-timers.
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So really the right way to state it would be that patents incentivize companies to develop _certain kinds_ of drugs. They actually _don't_ incentivize companies to make effective drugs of all kinds. It's a very important distinction that gets overlooked.
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Replying to @cmuratori @bentruyman and
And extend that a little further and you realize that patents specifically encourage the creation of _exactly those kinds of drugs that make healthcare expensive_! Because drug companies aren't going to invest $3bln into a drug that they can't then pull > $3bln out of us for.
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Replying to @cmuratori @bentruyman and
So, circling back around, I'm pretty sure patents are actually horrible for health outcomes, and I'm also pretty sure you can make the case very cleanly using mostly analytical evidence.
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