For the purposes of this thread I will assume this government meets my criteria for being just. You don’t have to worry about my hijacking it with my wacky political views, I promise.
Inspired by Fear Itself in this thread. Short backstory: his wife suffers from a rare disease that affects 150,000 people. He points out that since the disease affects so few people, the only way for research to happen is if the government subsidizes it as the client base is so small that there would be no motive of profit in a free market. On this assumption, he claims the government is justified in taxing the population of 300,00,000 to pay for the health care of 150,000.
Do you agree? Disagree? What if the number weren’t 150,000 but 7? I’ll stay out of it for the first several posts. I’m curious what you think.
The thing about research, especially very novel work, is that you do not know what it will produce and how the knowledge gained will apply to other subjects.
Novel research is partly about coming up with a cure(in medical terms) but it is also about understanding how the body works, or at a more fundamental level, about how life itself works.
Pharmaceuticals have a differant set of priorities, and whilst making money is a worthy cause, it also means minimising risks in an already risky environment.
You are not likely to make a great deal from researching conditions that affect a few tens of thousands, but the understanding gained may well be very important and may well provide much greater benefit, to say nothing of training minds and educating the scientists.
Precisely. I’ll add that this cuts both ways; in biology a lot of times people seem to sell their research projects to grant review boards and to laymen with some obscure disease (I know someone who “works” on Hirschsprung’s disease, but really cares about neuronal guidance)–but their real interest is in some fundamental question of how biology works. The government should fund this sort of research, because it has general applications–the better we understand basic science, the better we can treat all disease. Science funding should be proactive as well as reactive.
When it comes to what government should fund, it should be whatever our elected representatives decide we should fund, because presumably they will make said decision based on how the public feels about it. If most of society feels it should be funding said research, then we should. The part of society that disagrees? Well, one of the reasons representative democracy works is because of the concept of “majority rule, with protection of minority rights.” The majority shouldn’t be allowed to decide that the minority has no legal rights, but at the same time, the minority has to live with the decisions of the majority until it becomes the majority.
That’s sort of what’s happened with Iraq. The minority that didn’t want to go to war didn’t get to stop it, because they were outvoted, but now they’ve outvoted those who want to continue the war (or at least maybe they have.)
The Constitution is a great general framework, the Congress can and should fund anything the majority desires as long as the specific legislation it is passing doesn’t violate the Constitution. The money they’re using is the money of society, and society has its representatives in Congress to decide how to use our money. The basic idea is, we should get to decide how our money is spent, and that’s the system we use (with our reps acting as our proxies.)
Well, it pretty much has to be debatable. Given limited resources (and unlimited spending possibilities), there has to be a point where we decide that spending the money on research to cure a disease that kills a small enough group of people isn’t cost effective. Every dollar that’s spend to fight Disease X isn’t able to be spent on Good Thing Y, and if spending that dollar on Good Thing Y will be able to save or improve the standard of living enough of more people than not spending the dollar on Disease X will kill or hurt, then it makes sense to spend it on good thing Y instead.
Well, of course. That does not mean government subsidy for rare-disease research is not wise/legitimate as a general principle, nor that the government is not “justified in taxing the population” for that purpose, which is what the OP is asking.
How can one justify spending money on saving a few lives when that same money can be spent on saving more lives? You get to a point where you just don’t have the funds to do everything. Unfortunately politics gets in the way and we have more money chasing too few lives IMHO.
The drugs in the OP seem like one such item, those people are living at the expense of many more who will die - again IMHO.
No, that’s not what the OP is asking. He’s asking us to to assume that “this government meets my criteria for being just”. He needs to flesh that out, but from the Pit thread, he appears to be rather libertarian-ish. So, in that sense your first post was right, but for the wrong reason. It’s not really debatable, from a libertarian perspective, because the answer is “no”.
I’d say the market takes care of funding for diseases where there is going to be a major need and companies realize they will make money. I think it’s a wonderful use of society’s resources to aid in the development of drugs that otherwise might not be worth developing.
You could say that about a hell of a lot of government programs. Utilitarianism is not how our government is run, clearly. Also, I refer you to casdave’s remarks on the unforseen benefits of research with low profit motive.
This argument would hold water if every drug were a life-saving drug. Then clearly the drug with the largest market would also be the drug that did the most good.
However, that’s not how the pharmiceutical industry works. There are many drugs under development that are not life-saving, or that provide only a small incremental improvement over the efficacy of existing medications. Drug companies pursue them because they anticipate that they will have a large market and be profitable. That’s fine – they’re in business to make money after all – but we shouldn’t assume that the profit motives of drug companies magically line up with what is best for society in all cases.
I’m having a rather difficult time seeing how this general statement about opportunity cost and tradeoffs really bears upon the question at hand. Let’s put this in concrete terms: are you saying that we shouldn’t engage in any government-funded research of the rare disease described in the OP until cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and all those other diseases are cured? If so, that seems very odd to me.
At the very least we ought to consider the marginal utility of adding additional dollars to the “big” research areas at the expense of the “small.” In other words, what will produce more results: adding $5 million additional dollars to research lung cancer (in which there may be hundreds of millions of dollars in research spending each year), or spending $5 million on a disease that affects fewer people, but would otherwise have virtually no funding? I’m betting that investing some money in small diseases would result in more lives saved than in a policy that stops research funding for all but the most major diseases, mostly because the success of research isn’t necessarily correlated with how much money we devote to it. If one is faced with spending some money in a field that is poorly understood, there may be much higher marginal returns on additional investment in that area, rather than investing more money in an area that is well understood but simply difficult to achieve results.
And for the record, I’m not only in favor of spending tax money on researching rare diseases, but also in favor of tax money being used to treat and prevent those diseases, too.
No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that if you have the choice in spending money so that, if you spend X Dollars on one project, Y people are saved, or if you spend X Dollars on another project instead, 2Y people are saved, all other things being equal, you should spend the money so as to save the 2Y people.
I think Forumbot is saying “you have X dollars to spend or return to the taxpayers. How few lives need to be saved before that money should be returned instead?”
It’s a legitimate question, as diminishing returns do kick in: raising everyone’s taxes 30% to fund research into progeria would be excessive.
Alright, I follow you… I think. And looking back on my post, I phrased my question really badly – I meant to ask whether you think investments in medical research should be prioritized on things like cancer, diabetes, etc. because there are more people who could be saved with breakthroughs in treatments. I see now the way I phrased the question before made it sound like a loaded question.
But how the heck is one supposed to know these things, like how many people will be saved by the research on disease X vs. Y? I imagine only crackpot scientists could promise that approving their grant request will save a calculable number of lives. It’s like saying, if I had $1 to spend, I’d rather spend it on a winning lottery ticket than a king-size Snickers bar. How am I to know whether the lottery ticket is a winner unless I buy it? While I don’t disagree with your idea, I just don’t see how it sheds any light on the subject.
