Topic: Health Care
Finding a Cure For AIDS We are looking for a cure for AIDS when we should be trying to find a cure for it. This is a question of incentives.by Troy Camplin
(Libertarian)
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
There are two reasons why we will not be finding a cure for AIDS anytime in the near future. And one of them is not the fact that we have never developed a cure for any virus before. We have vaccinated against viruses before (polio and smallpox being the most famously wiped out by vaccination but why has it been so long since we had at minimum a vaccination cure?), but we have never developed a cure for one. Yet this is not the reason I am pessimistic.
I am fully confident that we will have the technological ability to wipe out AIDS. HIV has some features that make it one of the best candidates for being the first virus to be cured even if it has other features that make a vaccine of it impossible. But technology is not the problem here. The problem is inherent in the social-political system. Nobody who could cure AIDS wants to.
This is not as insidious as it sounds. We are merely talking about incentives here. As comedian Chris Rock once said, they will never cure AIDS the money's not in the cure, it's in the treatment. The money's in the comeback. And he's right. If a pharmaceutical company can keep you alive with AIDS for 50 years, they will. That's 50 years of profits from treating you. This is in their best interests as a company. If they came up with a cure, there would be a short-term profit from selling it to everyone (assuming the government did not figure out a way to nationalize the cure, in the "best interest" of mankind), and then that would be the end of it. Once everyone was cured of AIDS, there would be no more HIV infections, and the cure would be useless. No company CEO in his right mind would want a product that eliminated its own need to be used.
The second reason why we will not be finding a cure for AIDS anytime in the near future is because of the way we fund AIDS research. There are university labs out there who are actively looking for a cure for AIDS they are not tied into the company profit motive, so one could argue that they are more likely to find a cure. However, we have a similar problem here was we have with the companies. These labs get grants to look for a cure for AIDS. Please note my wording here: they get money to LOOK for a cure, not to FIND one. IF you know that so long as you are looking for something, you will continue to get millions of dollars, wouldn't you continue to look, without bothering to find what you are looking for? Again, I don't think this is a conscious choice. But the fact of the matter is that there are labs across the U.S. that would cease to get money year after year if a cure for AIDS were found. Thus, it is not in these labs' best interest to find a cure only to continue looking for one.
I'm sure there are a few people out there who sincerely want to find a cure for AIDS. Unfortunately, they are not numerous enough to increase the odds of actually finding a cure. We cannot only rely on the people who are looking for a cure for the "right reasons." I personally don't care if you find the cure because you are altruistic or greedy so long as you find the cure. We need to change the incentive structure. We need to stop paying people to look for a cure for AIDS, and instead pay them to find one. What this means is that we should at the very least create an award perhaps a combination of government and private funding for the person who finds a cure for AIDS. Various governments from around the world could contribute to it, as well as private individuals. And people could continue contributing to it over time. I would think that the award should be at least in the billions of dollars. It should be such a large award that any incentive not to find a cure is wiped out. And this award should be in addition to the money made from the cure itself being used. Typically I'm not one to advocate governments spending money on much but I think it is clear that in a case such as this, they money spent on the award would result in far less money being spent in the future.
We need to stop being romantic about somebody coming up with a cure out of the goodness of their hearts. A cure will only come about when a sufficiently large carrot is dangled in front of those who have the ability to develop a cure. None of this nonsense about what people "should" be doing, that they "should" find a cure because it's the "right thing to do." If we want actual results (and the people who speak such nonsense do not want actual results, only to feel good about themselves having judged others for doing things for the "wrong" reasons), we have to change the structure of our incentives. This is the only way we will actually ever find a cure for AIDS. And once this works, we can move on to cancer and any of a number of other diseases. Cures will come only when we reward the finding of cures rather than the looking for them.
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The views expressed in this
article are those of Troy Camplin only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Troy Camplin is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
Great Article and true to capitalist incentive of good medicine. I find it funny that we humans fear certain types of death more than others. Political action committees will blast numbers at your face like oh, Xxx,xxx number of people die from AIDS/HIV every year in location x ect. Religion (all of them) make contraceptives and aplicable science from occuring in regions where AIDS is an epidemic. (Condoms blocked by all 3 monotheistic religions Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) There is also a large number of people who want to apply ethical standards to stem cells.
If we fear death so much based on numbers (Iraq, AIDS/HIV, Cancer), then I want someone to find a cure for car crashes. Known preventatives are so effective and cheap now, but people are too stupid to use them. I say educate and then let the stupid die.
Good article. Can you blame the pharma companies? Not really. As the saying goes, "Don't blame the players, blame the game."
Pharma companies, like all public companies answer to the shareholders. Shareholders want long term profit growth. And what type of drug allows pharma companies to deliver long term profit growth to shareholders? Answer: Any drug that keeps you healthy that you MUST take for life. So it's not like the pharma companies don't want you to live a long healthy life. They want you to be as healthy as possible, just not completely cured.
There is another reason that we will never see a cure to HIV that the author did not mention.The clinical trial process. The clinical trial process in the US has resulted in the safest drugs in the world. However, there is a downside as it relates to finding a cure. Let's say you have some bright university researcher who is working on a vaccine that he/she believes will eliminate HIV. In order to bring that vaccine to market, it must first go through the clinical trial process. Federal and state grant money is not enough to fund a Phase III clinical trial, so who does the university researcher have to turn to? Pharma companies! The exact companies who are not interested in finding a cure in the first place.
Bottom line...unlike the author, I don't believe there is any incentive that is large enough to get pharma to budge and deliver an HIV cure when they're currently reaping billions year after year from HIV treatment drugs.
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