The public funds the breakthroughs. The public pays for the research. The public builds the universities, supports the scientists, funds the clinical trials. Then the public gets locked out of the results.
This is not a bug. This is the business model.
The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 codified the theft into law. Before that, federally funded research belonged to the public. Your tax dollars paid for it. You owned it. The Act changed that. It allowed universities and companies to patent discoveries made with public money. Your investment. Their profit. Theft written into statute.
The rhetoric says innovation serves humanity. The reality says innovation serves shareholders. If the people who funded it can’t access it, it’s not innovation. It’s extraction.
Alec Smith was 26 years old. He lived in Minnesota. He had Type 1 diabetes. He aged out of his parents’ health insurance and couldn’t afford the $1,300 monthly cost of insulin. So he rationed. He tried to make his supply last. He died in 2017 from diabetic ketoacidosis. His body shut down because he couldn’t afford a drug that costs $10 to produce.
The insulin he needed was discovered with public funding. Frederick Banting and Charles Best sold the patent for $1 in 1921 because they believed insulin belonged to humanity. They believed medicine should not be profit. Three companies now control the market. They’ve raised prices year after year. Americans pay the highest insulin prices in the world. People like Alec Smith die rationing it.
The drug exists because of public investment. The drug kills because of private greed.
This is not an accident. This is the system working as designed.
The public pays for medical research through the National Institutes of Health. $47 billion annually. The NIH funds basic science, clinical trials, drug development. Pharmaceutical companies take that research, patent the results, and set prices that exclude the people who funded them.
COVID vaccines. Operation Warp Speed poured billions of public money into development. Moderna’s vaccine was built on NIH-funded research. The public paid for the science. The public paid again for the shots. The companies kept the patents. The companies kept the profits. The public paid twice. The private sector extracted once.
Cancer drugs developed with NIH funding cost $100,000 per year. Gene therapies cost millions. Americans file medical bankruptcy at staggering rates. The leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States is medical debt. Sixty-two percent of bankruptcies involve medical bills. People lose their homes because they got sick. People die because they can’t afford drugs their tax dollars helped create.
The EpiPen costs $30 to manufacture. It sells for $700. The drug inside is epinephrine. It’s been around since the 1800s. The delivery device was developed with public research. The price exists because one company bought the competition and raised rates. The public funded the science. The public pays the ransom.
The counter-argument is that innovation requires profit. Without profit incentive, no one would develop new drugs. This is a lie. The public sector already does the heavy lifting. The internet came from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). GPS came from the military. mRNA technology came from NIH-funded research. Touchscreens, voice recognition, the foundations of computing. All built on public investment. The breakthroughs come from public money. The profits go to private hands.
Profit is not required for innovation. Profit is required for extraction.
Universities were supposed to serve the public. Land grant universities were built on federal land. Public universities were created to educate and advance knowledge for the common good. They’ve become patent factories. A drug developed at a public university gets patented by the university, licensed to a pharmaceutical company, and sold at prices students can’t afford. The university takes a cut. The company takes the profit. The public that built the university pays again for access to what the university produced.
The double payment is the business model. Pay for research through taxes. Pay again for access through prices. The public invests. The private captures. The public pays twice. The company profits once.
Other developed countries negotiate drug prices. They pay a fraction of what Americans pay for the same drugs. Americans subsidize global pharmaceutical R&D while being gouged at home. The same drug costs $100 in Canada and $500 in the United States. Same drug. Same company. Same research. Different price.
The global dimension compounds the crime. Drugs developed with American public money are priced out of reach for people in developing nations. The public investment is global. The exclusion is global. Humanity funds the breakthrough. Shareholders decide who lives.
The lie is that the market produces innovation. The truth is the public produces innovation and the market captures it. The lie is that high prices fund research. The truth is public money funds research and high prices fund shareholder returns.
Alec Smith died at 26. He couldn’t afford $1,300 a month for insulin. The insulin he needed was discovered with public money. The patent was sold for $1 by scientists who believed it belonged to humanity. The companies that control it now price-gouge Americans. Alec is not the only one. He is one of thousands who have died rationing a drug they helped fund.
If the public funds it, the public should own it. Or at minimum, the public should have access at cost. This is not radical. This is the return on investment the public already made. The public paid for the research. The public built the universities. The public trained the scientists. The public made the breakthroughs possible. The public should not pay profit margins for what the public created.
Anything else is theft. The innovation economy is a machine for converting public investment into private profit while the public pays twice and dies for lack of access.
You paid for it. You should have it.
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“Universities were supposed to serve the public. Land grant universities were built on federal land. Public universities were created to educate and advance knowledge for the common good. They’ve become patent factories. A drug developed at a public university gets patented by the university, licensed to a pharmaceutical company, and sold at prices students can’t afford. The university takes a cut.”
That can’t be true – I’ve been told that UCD, for example, exists to save the world. And that they don’t have room to house their students or staff on former federal land (which supposedly belongs to the Indians, anyway – much like DJUSD’s Patwin and every other school site).