Picking up where the free market fails

[bamacre]

I went to the local pub last night for "trivia night," and met one of my brother's neighbors who tagged along. He's a doctor at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

He's not just a doctor, he literally makes new drugs. Cancer in children is fairly rare, and pharmaceutical companies just don't make drugs that won't be profitable. When he said this, unfortunately my politically-corrupted brain thought "wow, this is a problem with free-market medicine." I mean, we can get pills that make sex at 60 more fun, but little kids with cancer aren't getting the medicine they need because it isn't profitable to make them.

Then he unknowingly proceeded to tell me I was wrong. Doctors like him pick up the slack. In fact he's not from here, he moved here from Australia. Why? Because St. Jude brings in the money. Not from government. All from donations, from here in the US and all across the world. They make the drugs that the for-profit pharmaceutical companies do not, and they are damn good at it. The results prove it. Their research and findings are spread across the planet, and cancer survival rates around the world have improved exponentially.

I live just minutes away from St. Jude and see them expanding, buying up surrounding buildings, tearing them down and building new ones. So of course, I asked him about funding. They have it. Plenty of it. They work hard to spend their $1.8 million a day of funding. They have to spend it, it's a non-profit entity of course. No one gets turned away due to an inability to pay. No one gets turned away because their insurance doesn't cover what ails them. And they even provide family lodging and meals for those too far away from home.

I really hate to use something so beautiful to help "prove" that freedom works, that we don't need government to solve all of our problems. I was actually reluctant to even post this. But at least this isn't fear mongering, I'm certainly not trying to scare someone into accepting my views. So for once it is nice to be able to use some "good news" to help make a point. We will always need government, to protect people, to protect property, protect rights, and to enforce law. But if we as a society can do something so important and so well, something the for-profit world can't, and we do it without government funding, it's hard to imagine what we can't.

 

[Hacp]

Originally posted by: bamacre
I went to the local pub last night for "trivia night," and met one of my brother's neighbors who tagged along. He's a doctor at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

He's not just a doctor, he literally makes new drugs. Cancer in children is fairly rare, and pharmaceutical companies just don't make drugs that won't be profitable. When he said this, unfortunately my politically-corrupted brain thought "wow, this is a problem with free-market medicine." I mean, we can get pills that make sex at 60 more fun, but little kids with cancer aren't getting the medicine they need because it isn't profitable to make them.

Then he unknowingly proceeded to tell me I was wrong. Doctors like him pick up the slack. In fact he's not from here, he moved here from Australia. Why? Because St. Jude brings in the money. Not from government. All from donations, from here in the US and all across the world. They make the drugs that the for-profit pharmaceutical companies do not, and they are damn good at it. The results prove it. Their research and findings are spread across the planet, and cancer survival rates around the world have improved exponentially.

I live just minutes away from St. Jude and see them expanding, buying up surrounding buildings, tearing them down and building new ones. So of course, I asked him about funding. They have it. Plenty of it. They work hard to spend their $1.8 million a day of funding. They have to spend it, it's a non-profit entity of course. No one gets turned away due to an inability to pay. No one gets turned away because their insurance doesn't cover what ails them. And they even provide family lodging and meals for those too far away from home.

I really hate to use something so beautiful to help "prove" that freedom works, that we don't need government to solve all of our problems. I was actually reluctant to even post this. But at least this isn't fear mongering, I'm certainly not trying to scare someone into accepting my views. So for once it is nice to be able to use some "good news" to help make a point. We will always need government, to protect people, to protect property, protect rights, and to enforce law. But if we as a society can do something so important and so well, something the for-profit world can't, and we do it without government funding, it's hard to imagine what we can't.

So he found the cure?

 

[Mardeth]

Eh, one case? Drop in the ocean? I actually even know what your point is? That free markets work even thought you said it yourself that it doesnt provide the resources for things that St. Jude provides? Can I make a post cosisting of only questions? I think I can. Oops. NOT!

 

[Thump553]

St. Judes is a shining example. Along with the Mayo Clinic they are the best of the breed. But the existence of St. Judes certainly doesn't mean our present system is working overall.

As a nation we spend way too much and get too little for our medical dollars.

I was reading a column in this morning's paper that stated 20% of INSURED cancer patients don't pursue treatment because of the expense. And those are insured people (goes to show that not all insurance policies are equal by a long shot, especially when expensive treatment is involved).

It has also been widely reported this week that medical bills are responsible for approximately 60% of personal bankruptcies. And frankly, from my observations that figure is almost certainly low.

 

[Atreus21]

Originally posted by: Hacp

Originally posted by: bamacre
I went to the local pub last night for "trivia night," and met one of my brother's neighbors who tagged along. He's a doctor at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

He's not just a doctor, he literally makes new drugs. Cancer in children is fairly rare, and pharmaceutical companies just don't make drugs that won't be profitable. When he said this, unfortunately my politically-corrupted brain thought "wow, this is a problem with free-market medicine." I mean, we can get pills that make sex at 60 more fun, but little kids with cancer aren't getting the medicine they need because it isn't profitable to make them.

Then he unknowingly proceeded to tell me I was wrong. Doctors like him pick up the slack. In fact he's not from here, he moved here from Australia. Why? Because St. Jude brings in the money. Not from government. All from donations, from here in the US and all across the world. They make the drugs that the for-profit pharmaceutical companies do not, and they are damn good at it. The results prove it. Their research and findings are spread across the planet, and cancer survival rates around the world have improved exponentially.

I live just minutes away from St. Jude and see them expanding, buying up surrounding buildings, tearing them down and building new ones. So of course, I asked him about funding. They have it. Plenty of it. They work hard to spend their $1.8 million a day of funding. They have to spend it, it's a non-profit entity of course. No one gets turned away due to an inability to pay. No one gets turned away because their insurance doesn't cover what ails them. And they even provide family lodging and meals for those too far away from home.

I really hate to use something so beautiful to help "prove" that freedom works, that we don't need government to solve all of our problems. I was actually reluctant to even post this. But at least this isn't fear mongering, I'm certainly not trying to scare someone into accepting my views. So for once it is nice to be able to use some "good news" to help make a point. We will always need government, to protect people, to protect property, protect rights, and to enforce law. But if we as a society can do something so important and so well, something the for-profit world can't, and we do it without government funding, it's hard to imagine what we can't.

So he found the cure?

Next thing you see will be Will Smith running down the street screaming followed by hordes of vampires.

 

[SammyJr]

Originally posted by: bamacreThen he unknowingly proceeded to tell me I was wrong. Doctors like him pick up the slack. In fact he's not from here, he moved here from Australia. Why? Because St. Jude brings in the money. Not from government. All from donations, from here in the US and all across the world. They make the drugs that the for-profit pharmaceutical companies do not, and they are damn good at it. The results prove it. Their research and findings are spread across the planet, and cancer survival rates around the world have improved exponentially.

While St. Jude receives a lot of private charity, much of their research is funded by NIH (Federal Government) grants. Just search the St. Jude website for NIH and you'll see many references to grants and grant applications.

 

[SirStev0]

I think you made a great post. The problem is that the St. Jude's and the Mayo clinics are in the minority. Most of the system is "For Profit" Exclusively.

I think you would be interested in reading about "Orphan Drugs". Basically it is a system the gov't put into the system to sway drug companies to do research/develop drugs for extremely rare disorders. Basically they get huge amounts of funds for other drugs and other research if they are willing to make certain extremely expensive and non-mass producible drugs.

I personally never understood why our government chooses to do drug research like it does. Basically, they give money to Pharm Companies (shitloads of money that is) and then the Pharm companies decide what researchers and universities they want to give money to. Instead of having scientists work for science, they work for the Pharm companies and it is the reason why some research has really lost it's quality and also why we have tons of research for keeping our hair and our erections and not very much for kid's cancer.
It just seems silly to give this "Private" company tons of money to charge even more and control the system. Wouldn't it make more sense that our gov't develop the drugs and control the research and then hold the patents and decide how much to charge? We'd be a lot less broke and though the gov't will always be corrupt, it will never be as corrupt as a corporation. The current system it seems only rewards those "private" companies and the politicians who's axels they grease.

If anyone is interested in the topic, I highly suggest reading the book "Science in the private interest" by Krimsky (First name Sheldon, I think). I read it for a medical ethics class and it is truly eye opening. He is the guy that was talking about corruption in the system years before anyone cared. Also with the title and a forward by Ralph Nader, you'd think it is extremely biased and one-sided; however, like a true scientist he writes it in a very systematic, fair way looking at multiple sides of the dice.

 

[Atheus]

If everyone shits in the streets, but then a group of nice people come along afterwards to pick it all up, that doesn't make it okay to shit in the streets in the first place.

 

[Moonbeam]

Link

 

[soccerballtux]

Curing child cancer is no different from curing old people cancer. Cure two kinds of cancer and you'll be able to cure all of them. There is plenty of research going into this.

 

[Atheus]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
Curing child cancer is no different from curing old people cancer. Cure two kinds of cancer and you'll be able to cure all of them.

Sorry but that's rubbish.

 

[Hacp]

Originally posted by: Atheus
If everyone shits in the streets, but then a group of nice people come along afterwards to pick it all up, that doesn't make it okay to shit in the streets in the first place.

I'm sorry but having cancer is not in any way related to shitting the streets. I totally agree with your underlying point though.

 

[Atheus]

Originally posted by: Hacp

Originally posted by: Atheus
If everyone shits in the streets, but then a group of nice people come along afterwards to pick it all up, that doesn't make it okay to shit in the streets in the first place.

I'm sorry but having cancer is not in any way related to shitting the streets. I totally agree with your underlying point though.

I meant the drug companies are failing the patients, and just because someone comes along and picks up the slack through the goodness of their own heart, that doesn't make the original failure okay. Didn't think I'd have t explain it.

 

[AreaCode707]

Excellent post!

To add a bit of a side story, without political intent, my housemate works at Children's Hospital in Seattle. With everything going on in the economy, and the state budget affecting health programs, they've stopped adding staff, put admins on the nurses' line (with some basic instructions and ability to escalate), are "encouraging" their admin and nursing staff to take as much unpaid time off as possible, and have trimmed their budgets so far that my housemate was literally hunting for extra pens/pencils and paper at our house the other day to take in to work.

<----is VERY pro free market health care, just finds these details interesting

 

[Craig234]

Libertarians are so poisoned in their focus on anti-government.

The issue here is the need people perceive to cure kids' cancer. The issue is there being a way to get that done and not whether it's done with or without government.

Government is nothing but a tool for the people to get done what they want done. If they want the government curing cancer, fine. If they don't, fine.

They're fixated on trying to 'prove' SEE LOOK MA NO HANDS WE DID NOT NEED GOVERNMENT!!

I really wonder sometimes if they are dealing with parent issues and having to 'feel independant and grownup' by rebelling against government.

It leads to irrationality - the exaggeration of the doctor who does something good, the ignoring of something the government does good - to prove a pre-determined conclusion.

It becomes 'a cause' that can be harmful in its blind aim.

The fact is that the issue is complicated. The government does huge good and can pose huge threat at times.

All it comes down to is society trying to hve the people's needs better met by distrbuting power with democracy than the traditional situation of a few having concentrated power.

Unfortunately, the means to doing that are highly corruptible - people tend to lobby more for their own benefit than for 'the public good'.

This leads to sayings such as how 'democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that hav been tried', trying to capture its good and its bad.

Another saying from Vietnam was about 'destroying a village to save it'; Libertarians seem bent on destroying society to save it.

What's wrong with simply a rational, democratic approach that says, let's use the private sector where it's effective to develop a profitable cure for one thing, and let's choose as citizens to fund research for a cure that isn't profitable but which as a moral issue we want done, and stop trying to use the issue to 'prove' some Libertarian agenda?

The charities Bamacre cites don't 'prove' much about Libertarianism. They disprove a straw man as if people said the government is needed for any good organizations; they also prove the need for government in the way that they are unable to meet 'the real needs' of society, the way that the norm withotu government programs was for the elderly to suffer in terrible poverty with only the mercy of family to help - it did not 'work' well for most.

In a way I understand the Libertarian desire to champion the human spirit against the gray bureacracy of one size fits all, impersonal bureacracy. But that's as much a failure of the people to use government properly as it is a failure of government. Have government be kept to the smaller size to avoid waste, but what's wrong with - as John Kennedy promoted - passionately supporting government in the good it does, too, as equally being the 'work of the people'? Is a cure for cancer less good depending on whether it was developed by private effort or government effort? I see this ideology at times; I literally walked out on a speech by Burt Rutan, who could be proud of his work in aerospace, because he had such a chip on his shoulder to try to say that basically everything NASA and thegovernment ever did was bad, and everything he does in the private sector is better. His level of contempt because of his anti-government ideology was offensive, I felt, it was hardly as if he was going to give proper credit to the efforts of the earlier programs upon which he can build now. What a poisonous ideology.

It's great to have a healthy analysis of what does and does not work about government; not so much a bias to reach only one conclusion regardless of the facts.

These comments are not targetted at Bamacre, who indicated his ambivalence, but at the more general Libertarian ideology I run across.

Do we need a much better example of the impact than the admission by long-time Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a direct follower of Ayn Rand, that he spent decades regulating the American economy on his theory that less regulation is basically always better, that the government is bascially always nothing more than a drag, and following the 2008 crash, that he realized he'd been quite wrong in his ideology? Not every example has the impact his does, but there are many like it.

 

[Phokus]

Originally posted by: SammyJr

Originally posted by: bamacreThen he unknowingly proceeded to tell me I was wrong. Doctors like him pick up the slack. In fact he's not from here, he moved here from Australia. Why? Because St. Jude brings in the money. Not from government. All from donations, from here in the US and all across the world. They make the drugs that the for-profit pharmaceutical companies do not, and they are damn good at it. The results prove it. Their research and findings are spread across the planet, and cancer survival rates around the world have improved exponentially.

While St. Jude receives a lot of private charity, much of their research is funded by NIH (Federal Government) grants. Just search the St. Jude website for NIH and you'll see many references to grants and grant applications.

Whoops

 

[techs]

Billions for erectile dysfunction.
Nickles for cancer cures.

Am I understanding the current drug development policies of the big pharmaceutical companies?

 

[Phokus]

Also OP, if you're concerned that companies are putting too much research into boner pills and not cancer medicine, then perhaps the market isn't as efficient at allocating resources as you thought it was.

 

[BriGy86]

I think the OP's main point is that more government is not always the solution to a problem. Even though St. Jude gets a lot of funding from government grants (according to SammyJr) it is not run by bureaucrats who have lost touch with reality.

 

[Elias824]

I always felt the role of govt is to control and run things necessary for our society to function, thing that wouldnt be practical to leave up to the private sector, like roads and the military. Also other things like Green energy, solar is much more expensive now then oil but if we wait for that to change before the private sector picks it up then it wouold probably be to late. Some things though can run amok and never really be practical like imo corn based ethanol.
So I think it is fine for them to step in to somplace like this where the private sector has no desire to pick it up, but that dosent mean the whole system is broken just because its not practical for some companies to research curing cancer for kinds and instead try to create "Boner Medicine". The govt will always have to pick up the slack in these areas, but how much, what to pick up, when to do it, and how much to spend, who they are giving it to really makes the difference.

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: BriGy86
I think the OP's main point is that more government is not always the solution to a problem. Even though St. Jude gets a lot of funding from government grants (according to SammyJr) it is not run by bureaucrats who have lost touch with reality.

How can government both provide a lot of funding and not be part of the solution at the same time? Government doesn't have to mean poorly run government, it doesn't have to mean pointy-haired bureaucrats who don't know the field overseeing everything. It can be (and often is) about finding people with a good mission and making sure they have the resources they need to complete it. Cases like this are perfect examples of how government can be good, the takeaway lesson should be that more government needs to be more like this, not that we need less government.

St. Jude's is doing awesome work, but their efforts are a drop in the bucket in terms of spending in the field of medicine. Imagine what they could do with more resources...

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: Elias824
I always felt the role of govt is to control and run things necessary for our society to function, thing that wouldnt be practical to leave up to the private sector, like roads and the military. Also other things like Green energy, solar is much more expensive now then oil but if we wait for that to change before the private sector picks it up then it wouold probably be to late. Some things though can run amok and never really be practical like imo corn based ethanol.
So I think it is fine for them to step in to somplace like this where the private sector has no desire to pick it up, but that dosent mean the whole system is broken just because its not practical for some companies to research curing cancer for kinds and instead try to create "Boner Medicine". The govt will always have to pick up the slack in these areas, but how much, what to pick up, when to do it, and how much to spend, who they are giving it to really makes the difference.

Whether or not the system is "broken" depends on your definition of "working". Drug companies are in a business where the best economic approach is to make drugs that the largest group of people will take for as long as possible. From the point of view of making money, they're working just fine...from the point of view of efficiently allocating resources in medicine...they suck. They're not going to "cure" anything, especially diseases that aren't a problem for rich white people, EVER, because they're hurting their own future profits that way. We'll see better and better AIDS drugs, but never at prices that poor people in Africa can afford them. If we want affordable drugs that CURE AIDS, we can't rely on the drug companies for that.

The free market being a good solution to most problems is misrepresenting economic theory. The free market means companies will try to maximize profits, a goal that doesn't always line up with what's best for everyone as a whole.

 

[SirStev0]

Originally posted by: soccerballtux
Curing child cancer is no different from curing old people cancer. Cure two kinds of cancer and you'll be able to cure all of them. There is plenty of research going into this.

That is so incorrect it isn't even funny.

One of the most basic misconceptions is that cancer is somehow all interconnected. There will never be a "cure" in the sense that we think of it.

 

[sandorski]

A Boner pill that cures Cancer, now there's a Drug!