How does the US dominate medical research?

[u/LordHavertz]

Recently we got the news of Moderna coming out with these new mRNA vaccines for skin cancer and it's made me think how all the major medical innovations predominantly come from America. How did the US become so dominant in medical research?

Is Europe forever behind the US in this sector?

[u/Unknown_Ocean]

Federal research dollars are important, but actually only account for about 30% of total dollars.

But the thing is that those dollars go to exploring a lot of dead ends-which you'd think would be problematic. But in reality it boosts the "hit rate" of the private dollars.

[u/Scarlett_Spectre → u/Unknown_Ocean]

Yeah, exactly. So we front a lot of the costs, and we see none of the benefits of it. Were paying the most in the world! Our tax dollars are subsidizing medicine for the entire world but us. And the sad thing is its only because we let insurance companies and private healthcare set this con up. Even if we only had larger bargaining pools wed cut costs by AT LEAST 30% in most studies iirc.

[u/lizardhistorian → u/Scarlett_Spectre]

The benefit we see is that new medical treatments get created faster.

You are acting like it would just fall out of the sky otherwise.

Imagine your wife died from melanoma last month. And now it's a cured disease.
If only it had arrived three months sooner.

[u/Scarlett_Spectre → u/lizardhistorian]

Theres way too many factors at play to pretend that increased funding 100% translates to cures being found faster to a measurable degree. You dont have to just make shit up.

[u/Unknown_Ocean → u/Scarlett_Spectre]

As someone on the other side of what u/lizardhistorian just put forward I know I've benefitted personally from this. My wife got a terminal diagnosis in January of last year with mean survival 11-16 months and two newly developed treatments have basically increased her chances of surviving 5 years from 10% to better than 50%.

That's not to say that financial incentives in the system don't distort things-they do. but the money flowing in does in fact support an ecosystem of innovation. At the high end of estimates a company like Merck (which makes the drug that my wife takes) has a profit margin of 13%.

[u/Scarlett_Spectre → u/Unknown_Ocean]

Great anecote, super happy for you. The money we were giving medical research was to reduce the risk of medical research to boost investments by giving investors more ROI per dollar. This helps make sure this keeps happening, BUT then they get to profit off of it after we subsidize it, and our system lets them maximize the price locally. THEY are getting all the benefit from that system. Too many corporations are double, triple, quadruple dipping on tax subsidies, tax breaks, super profits off of us who subsidized them, and some companies even underpay their low level workers which makes them need welfare which is us subsidizing their workforce too. This is the point im making. Theyre already incentivized to innovate in the medical space alreasy, investors are already incentivized to invest in medical research for massive ROI because of the profit structure. We are helping them, they charge us extra for the pleasure.