Brad Plumer's got a good post on socializing drug research that you should all read. Folks following my Tapped contributions (I really need to remember to write those end of the day Tapped round ups/open threads that you all keep bugging me for) know I've been on an anti-Big Pharma kick and, judging from Brad's piece, I've been reading all the same materials he has. And since Brad's a very smart guy, I'm glad we've come to the same conclusion: there's no reason we need to fully nationalize the pharmaceutical industry, but some heavy-handed regulations and a larger mandate for public research couldn't hurt anything.
It's also worth saying that we should shred the Bayh-Dole Act: taxpayer-funded NIH and academic research should not be cheaply signed over to pharmaceutical companies so they can charge obscene prices for the products. You want to go after double taxation, go after the fact that Americans use their tax dollars to pay for the R&D and their savings to pay wildly inflated prices for the result. Make it open source instead, and channel the funding so there's more of it -- the government is damn good at drug research, and they, unlike Big Pharma, actually do throw the money at research.
Funnily enough, the folks advocating for partial socialization and heavy regulation of Big Pharma are actually on the side of increased competition here, it's really the current patent system and the clever exploitation loopholes in the Hatch-Waxman act that's allowed for a thousand little monopolists to bloom. And while I'm not saying we need to mow down the whole batch, opening up the industry and tamping down on its more grossly greedy practices would be good for medicine and good for health costs. My feeling, though, is now that the government is paying for drugs through Medicare, you're going to see some movement on this front in the fairly near, post-Republican future. It's just too rich a source of savings to ignore.
