Impactiviti is a great blog but sometimes I disagree. Like today with this post, How to Kill Off an Industry.
The article Impactivit refers to claims that since growth rate of drug company research in Europe is not the same as the US this "proves" universal healthcare doesn't work.
This is a very common argument. Only problem is that it isn't valid.
Drug companies are global organizations. If European drug companies do worse than US drug companies, that is not because US is a better market, but because the US companies have better drugs. They all sell in the same global market place.
And if less R&D is allocated to Europe than the US, this could of course be some kind of retaliation by both European and US drug companies, but it could also be that the US is the leading country in the world and that most research is being done here, which attracts know-how and more research.
Clearly drug companies don't seem to have a problem with the fact that they pay research scientists salaries that are two, three, sometimes four times higher in the US . . . than in Europe.
3 comments:
Could another factor be that in some European countries drug prices are controlled? For example in The Netherlands drugs are included in healthcare. The total package, healthcare insurance, plus meds, etc., I believe, costs Eu 90.--/month. And there may be other factors as well. Drugs are doing very well in the U.S., because the prices are so high, and include huge profits.
No . . . this is exactly my point . . . but opposite. Drug companies don't first look at drug prices in a country and then decide to do research in that particular country. There are global, multinational organizations, and they don't depend on local countries. They do research where they already have resources and know how . . . drug pricing is not what drives in what country they put research facilities.
Sullivan's article does have a tendency to confound two different things - socialized medicine (as in the delivery of medicine to patients), and socialism as a societal operating system (impacting innovation and competitiveness).
The first, I think, will not tend to have any true effect on R&D - they are not necessarily related phenomena. So the discussion should be on the second - why would companies pour more R&D efforts into US-based facilities and staff? What is it about the two systems (one leaning more toward free-market capitalism, the other leaning more toward socialism) that impacts decisions such as where to build up R&D?
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