Oh really?
I tend to hear this a lot. It's usually an exclusive criticism of private healthcare.
If someone finds a cure, I'd be willing to pay for it.
The argument is that the greedy doctors would not sell a cure if they could make more money selling treatment over time.
The principle is that in a free-market, a doctor would not provide a service that has a conclusion, when they can offer a similar service without a conclusion.
Just apply this to any other service or product in the market.
If a company were to just 'treat' a problem, rather than 'fix' it, the customer would cancel service. If I bring my computer or car in for repair, I expect it to be repaired, not just given a 'treatment'. When people want their plumbing fixed, they want it to be FIXED.
So if someone finds a cure, those looking to make money off treatment would have their plans squashed, as every one would jump ship to get the cure.
The only argument that can be made is that only one entity discovered the cure, and hid it from everyone. This is of course highly unlikely, since competitors wouldn't be far behind in finding that cure themselves, and that sort of information would be tough to keep secret.
There is profit in a cure.
there is a cure for probably all cancers and tumors. cleanse, stop eating toxins and start eating super foods and alkaline foods. and there is more speicific stuff for those who are at stage 4 and terminal with cancer, like apricot seeds.
what's funny is, most alternative medicine people are libertarians, but most libertarians are not alternative medicine people.
I think the stronger argument would be that pharmaceutical companies wouldn't bother investing to find a cure in the first place. This doesn't make sense with big name diseases, like breast cancer, because there would be significant demand. But with diseases that kill under 1,000 people a year, orphan diseases, drug companies lack the incentive to drop billions into research. The price at which they would have set the drug in order for it to be profitable would just be too high.
they said we would have an unfair fun advantage
You're right, but then you have to ask; what would happen if we DID divert billions of dollars to diseases that kill under 1,000 people a year? What would the economic consequences be? How many people would die from those funds not being used where they would originally be used? It's really hard to say.
Ultimately, the law of supply and demand provides the best means for allocating resources to what consumer's value.
How many people would die from those funds not being used where they would originally be used?
Well, its unlikely that any would die from say, a 1% tax used to fund drug research (not that I'm advocating this).
The point is, while most people would be better off under a free market in health care, some would be much worse. In some cases, it would actually be true that "there's no profit in a cure."
How would some be worse off? And who is this "some"?
As in funny-weird.... yes I agree with you, limitgov. It is a bit strange but I think I sense some new impetus. Mike Adams of naturalnews.com has been getting some airtime in Libertarian circles and he seems keen to learn about Libertarian, specifically AnCap, ideas.
For me the real distinction worth making is between public and private. Some Libertarians take some companies at face value as being private but were it not for a rigged market, they would be at the bottom and therefore powerless to perpetuate lies about the extent to which ill-health is related to diet. The Peer Review process, a big part of the problem in my opinion, will crumble soon... unless the internet[freedom] is shut down.
Those who benefit from subsidized research in rare diseases.
How much is being subsidized into rare diseases, anyway?
In a free-market, once a company sells off a particular cure well and makes a boatload of cash, don't you think they'd want to invest a decent amount of that into another possible cure to maintain at least some more profit (even if it may not be the goldmine they had with the more common diseases). These companies could have subsidiaries that deal with the rarer diseases.
It is true that there is more money in medicine than forces people on to a continuous use schedule than a one off cure. But I think a larger problem than the apparent problem of a profit motive in the pharma industry is the massive barriers to entry. I am sure you have seen the cancer documentary, Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business. Even if you don't agree with the documentary, what you can see from it is how difficult it is to actually get a cure past the corrupt and troublesome bureaucrats in the regulatory bodies. Of course with such high barriers to entry it restricts competition and leads to pharma companies being in a position where they can, buyout new cures and put them on a shelf. As if you invent a cure for say aids and it will cost $150 million to get it approved and then even more to produce it, but a big pharma comes to you and offers you $100 million for it. In my opinion this causes more problems than the profit motive.
Without the profit motive a lot of the medicines would not be invented in the first place, nevermind cures.
The Orpan Drug Act was passed in 1983. Although wikipedia doesn't say how many dollars went into orphan drug research that wouldn't have been spent that way otherwise, it does give us some idea of its effectiveness:
Before Congress enacted the ODA in 1983 only 38 drugs were approved in the USA specifically to treat orphan diseases. In the USA, from January 1983 to June 2004, a total of 1,129 different orphan drug designations have been granted by the Office of Orphan Products Development (OOPD) and 249 orphan drugs have received marketing authorization. In contrast, the decade prior to 1983 saw fewer than ten such products come to market. From the passage of the ODA in 1983 until May 2010, the FDA approved 353 orphan drugs and granted orphan designations to 2,116 compounds. As of 2010, 200 of the roughly 7,000 officially designated orphan diseases have become treatable. In 2010, drugmaker Pfizer established a division to focus specifically on the development of orphan drugs as other large pharmaceutical companies focused greater efforts on the orphan drug research.
In short, before the law was passed, less than one orphan drug went to market per year, and afterwards, about 12 went to market per year.
They wouldn't create subsidiaries if they didn't expect it profitable to do so. Even the most generous hearted CEO wouldn't dedicate his time to curing a disease that afflicts, say, 500 children a year -- especially not when he could direct his energies curing a disease that afflicts 500,000 a year. I totally agree that the profit motive absent IP protection would drive companies to continually innovate and find new cures rather than sit on existing ones which would quickly lose profitability as competitors entered the field. However, they wouldn't jump to the rare disease until the common ones were all figured out.
I don't think what I'm saying is contraversial. Its more profitable (and more humanitarian in most peoples eyes) to cure 1 million people instead of 100,000. Government intervention skewed this by providing tax incentives and direct monetary subsidy. As such, more money is currently being spent researching cures for rare disease than would be under a free market. Therefore, under a free market, individuals suffering from rare diseases are less likely to be cured than under government intervention -- hence, they are worse off.
I'll write more later, but my unresearched opinion is that researchers make more easy money "looking" for cures than they would make by finding them, waiting 7 years and spending billions of dollars in the process of FDA approval, only then to finally start making profits. Sure they could potentially make more with a cure, but a grant is guaranteed free money NOW vs potential money later.
RagnarD: I'll write more later, but my unresearched opinion is that researchers make more easy money "looking" for cures than they would make by finding them, waiting 7 years and spending billions of dollars in the process of FDA approval, only then to finally start making profits. Sure they could potentially make more with a cure, but a grant is guaranteed free money NOW vs potential money later.
Translation: once again, government meddling creates perverse market incentives. Then the market gets blamed.
Btw, this brings up another example. In a libertarian society without IP laws, what incentive would there be to spend billions on developing a new cancer drug if you knew that the second you come up with it and the formula gets known, anyone will be free to copy it and undercut you.
Not that I'm certainly for IP laws, but I'm looking for the answer here from the anti-IP advocates to allieve my fears I suppose. Are drugs hard to reverse engineer or something. Probably in such a scenario, only difficult to reverse-engineer drugs would get made.