There are times where the government, can, and should drop in and buy the entire IP associated with a medication. This price should be set with a council of various representatives, and it should not be something that the drug manufacturing company can reject.
Most of the research here is already partially funded by the tax payer through Government funds of colleges, etc etc anyway.
This isn't even something unheard of. The US has the power to unilaterally cancel patents.
Solving obesity is free. For the vast majority of people, Ozempic or Wigovy is solving a motivation/discipline problem, not an obesity problem.
> This price should be set with a council of various representatives, and it should not be something that the drug manufacturing company can reject.
Any other authoritarian ideas? What a great way to destroy innovation.
I'd invert that: on the scale of a population, motivation and discipline are empirically not the cure for obesity. The statistics and the studies are on my side here. I agree that it would be convenient if that strategy, which we've been trying for about 80 years now, suddenly turned out to work. But my guess is doubling down on it wouldn't be any more effective than it has been, so let's take this new approach, which appears to work much better, seriously.