Russ Roberts: belief

Transcript context

…Right. Especially globally. Right? Right. I’ve talked endlessly now on EconTalk, I’ve an episode coming up soon on this question of this challenge we have of the semi-free market, this weird market we have in pharmaceuticals that I think is poorly constructed. The incentives are wrong. We’re encouraging innovation that adds a couple of months of life at enormous costs of both research and then Medicare payments. It seems like it’s just a mistake. It’s a bad system. At the same time, I don’t want to take the profitability out of the pharmaceutical business, and I want Gilead and other companies to have… and Roche and others who develop this new test that’s relatively quick… I want them to have a big incentive to really solve this problem. The number on way we do that is to day, “Well, you’re going to be able to charge a lot for it,” and I think that’s not going to happen either culturally or legally for legal or cultural reasons. With the externality of infectiousness, you don’t want the price to be high. Right?…

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