A team of cancer doctors have written an op-ed in Mayo Clinic Proceedings outlining their vision for how to make quality cancer drugs while keeping prices low.
Their solution basically comes down to controlling the price and hoping science will still happen. They don't think making scientists work for nothing will impact drug discovery and cite Canada as an example. But they don't seem to have actually studied the Canadian drug market. The Canadian government controls the maximum price of new drugs, for example, but many new drugs don't get sold there for that reason. And the price of generic drugs is also controlled - but not on the high end, on the low end. So Canadians end up paying for more for generic drugs that are inexpensive in the United States. Canada has a robust generic market but little original pharmaceutical work for those reasons.
Would cancer doctors be happy if they had to work for $15 an hour? Would they be content if their wages were controlled by a remote committee, and the quality of their work was irrelevant?
Of course not, but they believe that is a reasonable solution for the best chemists in the world. Alarm bells have to ring when people in one area insist their own income should not be controlled but penalizing experts in another area is fine. Writing at Science 2.0, American Council on Science and Health President Hank Campbell itemizes the economic and medical fallacies and translates them into real world consequences.
"Everyone gets a vote, and inputs on policy issues are important, but it would be a real mistake to let academics in an ideological sandbox have greater cultural weight than actual experts who have developed real products, like we have at the Council," Campbell said.
