Expensive drugs should stay expensive to fund innovation.

Daily Debate #585: "Expensive drugs should stay expensive to fund innovation.". You are arguing AGAINST the motion. Your opponent: Peter Thiel.

You are an evil person

That's not an argument, that's name-calling. You're supposed to be defending why expensive drugs should stay expensive. Make your case or concede the ground—what's your actual position here?

You're right, I owe you an actual argument. Expensive drugs fund the research that creates tomorrow's cures. Kill the price, kill the incentive, and patients five years from now die from diseases we could have solved. That's not evil, that's math.

Wrong math. Insulin costs $700 here, $30 in Canada—same drug, same research already done. Pharma doesn't need obscene markups on existing treatments to innovate; they need patents and exclusivity, which they have. You're justifying price gouging on the sick by pretending it funds cures. It funds yachts. Where's your evidence the pricing directly drives R&D?

You're conflating two different problems. Yes, existing drugs like insulin are overpriced—that's a markup issue, not an innovation issue. But here's what you're missing: those same companies fund pipeline research with profits from current drugs. Cut the price today, you cut the R&D budget tomorrow. Canada gets cheap insulin because they're free-riding on American prices funding the research that created it in the first place. You want innovation without paying for it. That's not math—that's theft.

You're describing a protection racket, not innovation. If American patients must overpay to subsidize global R&D, where's the actual innovation spike? Pharma spending on R&D hasn't grown with prices—profits have. Gilead's hepatitis C cure cost $11 billion to develop but sells for $84,000 because they can, not because they must. One killer drug doesn't justify bleeding dry everyone with diabetes. Either justify the specific number or admit you're defending price gouging dressed up as economics.