this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2026
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[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 hours ago

As opposed to now, where companies copyright and patent their medications and sell them ultimately to...taxpayers who pay them billions of dollars a year in just out of pocket costs, let alone the scheme that is the American private insurance/healthcare system.

If taxpayers had to fund drug companies or research institutions for R&D without the insane middleman that is the private healthcare/insurance system, it would cost a fraction of what it does now.

On top of that, this assumes that people won't do research for the good of society vs becoming filthy rich, which is a false assumption driven by Capitalist propaganda. Remember that the ultra wealthy CEOs and executives of these drug companies aren't the ones doing any of the actual work or research. That is all done by scientists and engineers, who make a decent living, but none of them are incredibly rich from it, classic Capitalist exploitation at work.

Often times these drug companies (and the private equity firms that own them) don't even primarily do R&D, they just purchase the patents and IP rights to drugs that are already on the market, and once they do that, they jack up the price often by hundreds of percent to increase their cashflow.

That cost gets sent to the insurance companies, which of course, they pass on to consumers, raising our healthcare prices year after year.

I want medical researchers, scientists, and engineers to make a good living, a very good living, their work literally saves and improves hundreds of millions of people's lives worldwide. But you don't need a CEO or executives, or private equity firms owning that space and making insane amounts of money, you just literally don't.

There are millions of very smart and passionate people around the world who want to do this kind of work because they enjoy it, and they want to make a difference. Providing an open and rigorous academic and scientific structure to study and practice this is all you need. That already exists today, many medical breakthroughs came from publicially funded research institutes, which is the way it should be.