BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
Patens are grossly inefficient. Our Plan Rewards Results

Dr Marcia Angell (former editor of New England Journal of Medicine) Only 14 per cent of budgets go on developing drugs. The case for the granting of patents is that the resulting profits are necessary to finance the expensive process of R&D. These artificial monopolies, however, have proved very inefficient. “The FDA estimates it costs over 7 million dollars to bring a new drug to market pharmaceutical companies put that figure closer to 70 million dollars.” [[http://www.naturalnews.com/020345.html]] This disparity shows R&D is a relatively minor financial concern. “The pharmaceutical industry spends nearly U.S. $57.5 billion on marketing and U.S. $31.5 billion on R&D” [[http://www.naturalnews.com/022698.html]]. The main concern of pharmaceuticals is not the cost of research and development but advertising to compete with other firms and create a market for its product. This is not necessary for life-saving drugs; you may need advertising to be convinced to buy a skin care product but you hardly need convincing to purchase a HIV drug that will save your life. Apart from need-instilling publicity pharmaceuticals spend fortunes ensuring their profits are not compromised by legislation. “Drug companies spent more than $3bn on lobbyists and political "contributions" over the past decade in the US alone.”[[http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-hidden-truth-behind-drug-company-profits-1767257.html]]. The vast majority of the profits pharmaceuticals get allegedly to facilitate R&D, go to publicity and lobbying. Our plan would end this ridiculous waste. It would subsidize and reward success and tangible improvements in vaccines that can save lives; it would pay for the R&D with none of the frills. This is further evidence of the viability of this proposal, with cheaper R&D and patent-free drugs health care systems across the world would save billions in addition to those saved by the absence of premi
Taking Away the Incentive to Produce Life-saving Drugs

Ron Pollack The pharmaceutical industry's repetitious cry that research and development would be curtailed if drug prices are moderated is extraordinarily misleading. [[ http://www.actupny.org/reports/drugcosts.html%5D%5D Yes, R&D costs money. Yet only 14% of pharmaceuticals' budgets go to R&D. Reports have linked "high drug prices to advertising, profits and enormous executive salaries. The report documents that drug companies are spending more than twice as much on marketing, advertising, and administration.”[[Ibid.]] Our plan does not threaten this pathetic level of investment spending. Firms are incentivized to undertake research in life-saving drugs because now they have a guaranteed return on their R&D investment. Regardless of the course of drug production and distribution they will be profit from their research. For non-life saving drugs revenue is spread over 20 years and is by not guaranteed to cover costs. Our plan is much more hassle-free for businesses and encourages higher investment in productive R&D by giving firms what they spend towards developing a new drug. This marks a break from the status quo where only one in five of drugs developed are actually innovative rather than rehashed copies of old drugs. [Ibid]] In addition to research by firms we also enable charitable-institutions and universities to carry out further research. Scientists are principally motivated by the desire for peer recognition and also by the fact that they want to have achieved something more with their lives than reduce some teenager’s pimples by 30%. The cost savings we offer would allow us to hire some of the world’s best scientists to work in renown campuses and research institutions with a view to find solutions to pressing illnesses while still being much cheaper than the current cost. We are not dissuading research into live-saving illnesses we’re invigorating it by offering inciting profit that is tied to results and is cost-effective.
Further Problems

The opposition claims that we have not shown why our model will reduce incentive to produce a drug for a non life threatening illness. Yet, since it guarantees a multi billion dollar prize fund for firms who succeed in developing a cure for life threatening diseases NOT non life threatening illness, it is quite evident how. This 'multi billion dollar prize fund', together with the revenue earned from sales of drugs and of course, the reputation that will be earned after making a life altering discovery, will deter firms from choosing to simply pursue patents. Moreover, we doubt firms will deliberately alter their drugs to ensure they are 'non life saving'. You forget the praise and respect that a pharmaceutical firm would get for finding a cure for horrifying diseases such as AIDS etc.Not to mention that on top of this new reputation, they will earn the prize fund as well as actual revenue from the sales of the drug! The huge wasted opportunities that the opposition is talking about are merely imaginary. Finally,the opposition has failed to understand why the system we are proposing will undeniably make drugs more accessible for people in developing countries. Once,under our method the new life saving drug is pooled into public, generic drugs developed. They are just as efficient but are substantially cheaper than brand names. According to the Congressional Budget Office, "generic drugs save consumers an estimated $8 to $10 billion a year at retail pharmacies". In fact, due to generics from India, the most commonly used combination of AIDS drugs used in developing countries now costs $80 per patient per year .This is 99 percent less than 10 years ago. This decrease in price due to generic drugs has improved and saved the lives of millions and with our method, which will only make generic drugs more easy to develop, even more lives will be saved. [[http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/publications/article.cfm?id=4328&cat=open-letters]]
From the Irrational to the Ingenius:The Status Quo and Our Proposal

Firstly, we would like some more clarity from the affirmative team on their model. When exactly are the going to pay scientists for their discovery? We will presume at this stage that it will only be when they have actually discovered a life-saving cure. How much will they pay them? Will it be the necessary hundreds of billions of dollars required for all the failed drugs, testing and getting through regulations? And how exactly would it suddenly allow millions to afford medicine, if all it was doing was essentially paying the companies the same amount of money that they would otherwise receive, only taken out of taxes rather than private income? Who would be paying for the fund? Opp assume Joseph Stiglitz doesn't have all that money himself. The prop have already identified a problem in their own case. They are necessarily reducing the incentive to produce life-saving drugs because whatever way you look at it, a company can make more money if they have a monopoly over a product than if it goes straight into the public domain. They have then stressed the fact that much of the demand is actually for things such as hair-loss drugs, because they are demanded in the West, and people in the West have the money to pay. If their model continues to protect patents on hair-loss drugs but not on those of life-saving illnesses, the incentive for the companies will actually be to invest in the non-life threatening illness drugs, because the difference in profit will be even greater. Firms have to pay off their costs, and just as importantly they have to make a profit. When prop speaks about the high prices being charged, that is the price that has to be paid for the huge expense of producing the drugs, which despite the scenario set up by the prop, actually do save enormous numbers of lives under the status quo. Lives are saved from pharmaceutical companies bringing new drugs to the market. Disincentivising this will cost lives.
The Consequences of the Huge Cost of the Plan

First of all, the 0,6 GDP plan were proposing is exactly that, not as opposition has suggested a 0,6 GDP per year plan. The plan set out by Stiglitz is meant to provide for the current diseases that exist so we’re looking at windows of about four to five years. The opposition has miscalculated the savings our plans makes. Here are the real estimates: HIV 33.2 million sufferers x 20,000 [[http://aids.about.com/od/hivmedicationfactsheets/a/fuzeon.htm ]] (actual cost of of HIV drug)= 66.4 billion per year; Cancer 12.7 million sufferers x 50,000 = 63.5 billion per year; and another 4 billion for malaria. The total amount saved for these diseases by using generic drugs that reduce the cost of “treatment by as much as 99%” is in the region of 101.2 - 132.5 billion a year. Their suggestion to purchase all the drugs needed at current prices costs vastly more in the medium as well as long-term. Once a drug is researched it can be produced for as long as it is useful rather than being paid for again and again. It also means we only pay for the 14% spent on research costs plus as much to act as an incentive rather than all the unnecessary expenses we have in the status quo. Objections were raised as to where the money was going to come from: beats us we not government economists. What we do know, however, is that the world got into this financial mess by not planning ahead of time this measure saves money in the long-term (contributing to medium to long-term sustainability) and is necessary. Apart from proving access to cheap drugs we also aim to reinvigorate research into new drugs of real significance rather than the stagnation of the status quo; this directly benefits all countries. The opp’s alternative was to throw the money at these countries in the form of aid which does not provide a sustainable solution to illness and cripple domestic markets. Our plan provides a crucial stepping stone to eliminating poverty by allowing for the suppression of killing dis
Patents Stifle Innovation on Life-Saving drugs. Our Plan Embraces it

The proposition's model will do nothing but reduce research into life-saving drugs, not increase. Firstly, goods and services demanded by the West will always be more profitable than those demanded by the developing world. This occurs in all markets. We don't force Apple to produce food parcels for Africa instead of iPods for the West. Income disparities will always exist whether we like them or not. Of course we don't like death in the third world, and we support aid and other mechanisms that help address that. However, a reallocation of Western investment simply because the proposition does not like Western medical drugs for non-life threatening illnesses is not a sufficient justification. Secondly and more importantly, the proposition model will actually have the opposite effect. The proposition has moved life-threatening illness drugs from a patent system to a reward system (which disallows monopoly profits). This means they earn far less profit than under the status quo. On the other hand, non-life threatening illness drugs in the West will still be able to be patented for monopoly profits. This will make the production of drugs for non-life threatening illnesses much more attractive in comparison. Why? Because then pharmaceutical companies can only earn monopoly patents by producing drugs for illnesses that are not life threatening. The proposition's model doesn't narrow this investment gap, it widens it further. Furthermore, as we analyse in our susbstantive point below, the fact alone that patents are removed on life-saving drugs is yet another reason why research and innovation of live-saving drugs will fall. Under the proposition model, research and innovation is disincentivised through both the removal of patents and the fact that patnents on drugs for non-life threatening illnesses remain. This point falls to the opposition.
Opposition Summary

It has been accepted by both sides in this debate that it is best if more lives are saved, and if more life-saving drugs are produced in the long term. The prop's case has been characterised by naive assumptions about their model solving everything, and basic misunderstandings of economics. The prop have founded their case on the idea that lots of generic producers will be able to produce drugs cheaply if patents are bypassed. However, there needs to be a massive incentive to get these drugs developed in the first place. They cost up to $800 million to get to market, and this means huge amounts of investment are required. Not only does this investment need to be payed back, there needs to be a promise of strong profit to pay off the risk of such a huge investment being unsuccessful (most drugs never go to market). As patents provide the ability to charge monopoly pricing, if there was no patent for life-saving drugs there would need to be an even greater incentive to stop companies producing non-life saving drugs instead. What this means is that whatever model the prop propose to provide these incentives, it will always be more expensive than allowing a company to patent a product, which at least makes it as valuable as a non-life saving drug. The prop's way of accounting for this problem of incentive was to to provide an enormous fund, using 0.6% of all GDP, to use as a reward scheme for the people producing drugs. We calculated this to be $348 million, which was accepted. Not only is this amount of money wholly implausible, as it is more than countries currently give in total aid (being from Greece, perhaps they want to borrow it?), it is also money that could be better spent elsewhere. First, it would be cheaper to simply buy the drugs for those who currently can't afford them. Under their model, they are effectively paying for everyone, not just those in need. Secondly, money spent on food, infrastructure and disease preventatives would be more effective overall, and save more lives, including people who don't just die from disease. And then there is the problem that people below the poverty line can't afford generics either. Prop have also contradicted themselves. Firstly: The point, it seems, is to provide a massive incentive to produce new drugs. The prop's case relies upon a remaining incentive for drug companies to want to produce generics. If the prop's model really provides such a huge incentive for new drugs then no-one will actually want to produce generics, so the cheap drugs won't come about anyway. Secondly, they have insisted that the people who produce drugs are altruistic, and this will make them produce life-saving drugs under their model. If the companies that produced life-saving drugs were altruistic, there wouldn't be a problem because they wouldn't charge monopoly prices. We showed you how in fact companies can and do perform price discrimination, by selling at cheaper prices in the developing world.
The world we should not live in.

We have already told you why massive returns are necessary to justify massive investment and risk in developing drugs, as so many drugs cannot go to market. To guarantee this return it is necessary for the developer to own that property so they can profit from it. If they don't, they will develop hair loss drugs instead. The prop has in response predictably fallen back on their billion-dollar prize scheme, which will apparently reward investors more than allowing them to own the property. For it to do this, it will necessarily have to cost more than just paying the fees that the drug companies charge. Why? Because if a company can make more money from the alternative, i.e. hair loss drugs, they will take that option. The prop says that they don't like drugs being a multi-billion dollar business. They aren't actually changing this, they're only suggesting a government-funded prize instead of a market one. However altruistic some scientists are, unfortunately they don't have $800 million dollars on their own. Large start-up investment is needed to produce any drug, and the prop needs to show how there will be an incentive for that investment. Either there won't be, because life-saving drugs will offer less return than non life-saving ones, or they will actually have to spend more money than is currently spent to provide that greater incentive. You're better off spending just buying the drugs under the current system. In fact, under their model, altruistic people will become less attracted to science as their is less return for making life-saving drugs, and consequently there will be less support by investors in these 'altruistic' medicines. The prop say that their model will reduce marketing costs, but if there are generic producers all producing the same good, only marketing gives them an edge over competition, so actually marketing costs will increase for life-saving drugs. As it is if company comes up with a life-saving drug, they don't have this extra cost.
Taking Away the Incentive to Produce Life-saving Drugs

Despite the absurdly low amounts given by the proposition, it costs an enormously large amount to get a drug to market. Even skeptics admit that it costs $100-200 million[[The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs, Merril Goozner ISBN 978-0-520-23945-6 Retrieved on 2009-07-15]] and it can go as high as $800 million per drug[[“The price of innovation: new estimates of drug development cost” (pdf) DiMasi J.A. et al.: , Journal of Health Economics 22(2003), 151-185. Retrieved on 2008-06-16]]. These costs include all the experimental drugs that don't work, getting through regulations to ensure the drugs are safe, and general high start-up costs to high-level scientific experimentation[[http://www.economist.com/node/2724420]]. Businesses therefore need to have a high return on every drug they produce. Moreover to this, they need the promise of large profits to encourage investment and creation in the drug in the first place. Creating a brand new drug requires enormous amounts of money and failed attempts, and therefore involves a large amount of risk. If a person can't be guaranteed some kind of control or return to that risk and expense, they are unlikely to want to invest in it. In particular, if a drug company can make more money by patenting drugs that cure hair loss, they will take that option. The affirmative has suggested a form of return, but they haven't show how they can guarantee a return to investment and a significant enough profit to give investors a reason to put their money towards drugs rather than something else, unless they allow a company to claim huge amounts of money in return. Even if they could make that guarantee, that would be for hundreds of millions of dollars for any drug that so much as reduces the effects of a life-threatening illness. Painkillers reduce the effects of life-threatening illness. Giving out large payouts to anyone that comes up with something that makes a small difference is definitely not viable.
Further Problems

Apart from the enormous costs of the prop's "plan", there are further problems. Firstly, the prop have not at any stage shown why their model will reduce the incentive to produce a drug for a non life-threatening illness. Not only does this mean they will produce less drugs for life-threatening illness, but it also means that when a company does produce a life-saving drug, they will still sue to protect patents under statements such as 'it's not life-saving'. If companies are as greedy as the prop say they are, they will still want to maximise profit and keep their patents, and will still attempt to litigate if they can. It also means that companies will deliberately alter their drugs to ensure they are "non-life saving" (in order to earn a patent). These are huge wasted opportunities to save lives that occur under the proposition model! Secondly, this will also encourage company secrecy for development of drugs. Often drugs that are produced are done in stages, with one compound patented and companies paying the patent-holder to do further experiments to develop the drug. If a company has a patent on a compound, but could lose that patent if another company develops it into a life-saving drug, they will be far less inclined to allow companies developing life-saving drugs to use that compound. Thirdly, the prop want to make these drugs more accessible for people in places such as Sub-Saharan Africa. The drugs will still cost money ($600 per year as opposed to $1000 in the case of AIDS drugs) and the people in Africa will not be any richer. Their model doesn't actually make it easier to directly buy and dispense these drugs because all of the money is spent on rewarding a company for creating a new drug. So people who live below the poverty line and become terminally ill still won't be able to buy their cheaper drugs. This means they actually don't help the people in greatest need anyway, and will still be left with all of the harms we have shown.
From the Irrational to the Ingenius:The Status Quo and Our Proposal

The current patent system is flawed to its very core. Under the status quo pharmaceutical firms make use of research from state-funded university labs, that has been released into the public domain, to base their own research programs. They usually enter late in the process when there already is a possible product in sight. Once a product is completed it is patented for the sole use of the company for a period of 20 years. This 20 year monopoly is rigidly enforced by both domestic & international law across the world. Devastating problems arise with this because the high prices charged by these firms to maximize their profit are too expensive for those in developing countries, and even in some developed countries that lack proper social security institutions, resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths. The current system suppresses innovation by placing legal hurdles to further researching and improving existing drugs. It also incentivizes spending on non-life threatening diseases common in the West (such as hair loss)and therefore bring in more revenue than those focused on poorer countries that can’t afford to spend as much on medication. Therefore, we propose a plan set out by Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz where an international multi-billion dollar fund would be set up to award scientists and firms once they discover or develop cures to life-saving diseases. This would aim to cover research costs but also incentivize research into life-threatening diseases over other ailments. Once payment is made the product is pooled into the public domain, available for use by any company anywhere in the world. While this would be expensive (0.6% GDP) it would pay-off in the medium term as health care systems would no longer have to pay huge premiums to drug companies. More importantly, it would allow for millions to afford medicines[[http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-hidden-truth-behind-drug-company-profits.html]]