A Delayed Reaction to the Gawande Column

My trail of thought following the Atul Gawande column.

First off, claiming that Africans won't be able to administer medicine properly because the majority of them don't own watches? Aaaarrrrgh!

It's refreshing to hear this perspective from someone with as much experience and success as Gawande. Certain professions do come with moral obligations, and medicine is undoubtedly one such profession. Journalism is another. More on that later.

So I'm thinking as far as drugs are concerned, we're facing some simple economic problems that get increasingly complicated by legal issues. Basically, there is a limited supply and lack of competition. The biggest issues that result tend to be (a) a shit product, e.g. Microsoft, and/or (b) more relevant to this case: right of the producer to charge whatever they bloody well feel like charging, e.g. Merck. Throw in issues of intellectual property and patent law and you have the big fucking mess that is the pharmaceutical industry.

This leads me believe that it makes very little sense to treat potentially life-saving drugs in the same manner as a Slinky. Were the industry structured along the investment bank model, employees would move freely between competitors bringing industry knowledge with them. Firms would be forced to rely on their ability to innovate and penetrate new markets for their profits, rather than a bullshit patent. But following the twisted path we've chosen, people now support the idea of gene patents.

Is the example above oversimplified? Sure. No one is denying the fact that it takes an enormous amount of human capital - graduates with highly specialized university degrees - to develop a new drug. Intellectual property surely has its place, but not when it begins to stifle much-needed innovation and competition within a market that needs it desperately. And certainly not when it begins to violate principles of basic human decency, as Abbott did with its blackmail of those who reproduced its HIV regimen.

I'll let you chew on that and get to the journalism bit later on. In the meantime, do your homework and read this.