I resent the belief that free market alone should dictate welfare.
If a cure for a disease isn’t seen a profitable, it isn’t investigated by drug companies.
Governments -all of us- have been hiding our responsibilities behind the belief that free market forces balance our various conflicting interests into a just and fair equilibrium.
This erroneous belief leaves private companies, driven by profit only, to care for the have and have-not of the world. While drug companies are generally happy to research and market for the have, the have-not are all too often left forgotten, to suffer and die.
It’s easy to fustigate those companies and to hold them responsible for this sorry situation, but we’re all to blame: by not encouraging our governments to boost fundamental research and finance drug design, we’ve all become responsible for letting people die in Africa, Asia, South America… well, in most of the non-western world.
Some will retort that financing the public sector to concurrence the private sector is bad in the long run: drug companies would have no incentive to research new drugs if governments would to concurrence and beat them with public funds.
The whole model is wrong: companies have overlapping research interests, but no co-operation. Efforts are duplicated in secret instead of being compounded. This is the result of a free market economy: it’s a fight for survival, and the risks taken are carefully measured against the profit they can generate. While this model has been great for the automobile industry, its side effects are devastating when it is applied to people’s welfare. We end up measuring the worth of a life using the same metric as for everything else: how much money is there to be made.
I find that very wrong.
