alt Hacker NewsHot take: stop funding biomedical research. Turn the tap off from which bleeding edge but super expensive therapies emerge. People won't demand what doesn't exist.
GLP-1 treatments alone are responsible for a plurality of the rise in costs this year and next. Over $7000/per/year for a huge fraction of the population.
I guess nixing patents might have the same effect, but it'd be easier to get Republicans onboard an approach that simply cuts outlays rather than one that ruins the wet dreams of biomedical research private equity.
Replies
It’s counter intuitive but totally valid. Another angle on this would be to lower the standards for clinical trials. The fact that it costs billions of dollars to run a drug trial is a key part of why everything is so expensive the FDA standards are extremely high. The result is safe drugs but it also makes the R&D market extremely skewed towards the big entrenched players. There is also no room for physicians or patients to take calculated risks. Sure it all falls into a sensible self consistent philosophy of “do no harm” but the side effects of that principle are extreme cost and actually slow innovation. In this modern era data collection should not be this expensive.
"Pace the frontier"
paying for GLP-1 is a net benefit to insurance pools, because obesity (and other uncontrolled hunger-like cravings) have very expensive downstream symptoms.