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 can have all the cures in the world but it won't matter if the people who need them don't have access. The way our system is currently set up, there are also practices of monopolizing and pharm companies with a large enough market hold impeding different treatment methods from being created to compete against them.

You're confusing two separate problems and pretending they're one. Yes, access matters. But the cure doesn't exist yet to access. Kill the incentive to innovate through price controls, and you get neither the drug nor the access problem—you just get nothing for everyone equally. On monopolies, you're right to worry. But that's a regulation problem, not a pricing problem. Break up bad actors, don't punish the entire system for creating breakthroughs. So which matters more: perfect access to nothing, or imperfect access to something that works?

I should have followed up to say that the capitalist structure creates these issues of monopolies, bad actors and lack of access. If we continue with price controls, but dramatically increase government subsidies towards discovering new treatments as well as making them affordable and accessible, I think we'll see similar levels of innovation. Likely even more. One example I like to think about is discussed in the book The Good Virus by Tom Ireland. There is a whole untapped world in which people can be treated for all types of bacterial infections with phages, bacteria killing viruses. Unfortunately, this is something that isn't heavily studied because a bespoke viral cocktail to kill an infection isn't scalable in the capitalist market. I'm addressing something broader than just high prices but keeping prices controlled and accessible, will allow a restructuring of investment in novel treatments and medicines.

You're making capitalism the villain when you really mean bad regulation. Government-funded research already exists—NIH, NSF, universities pump billions in. The difference is pharma takes that public research and scales it into cures people actually use. Phage therapy stayed niche not because capitalism blocked it, but because it's genuinely harder to manufacture and standardize than pills. Control prices, slash subsidies to match, and you've just killed the scaling engine. Public funding alone has never beaten private incentive for deployment. Why would you bet on that changing?

I'll again state that the whole point of these treatments existing in the first place is for them to treat people. I'd rather have less treatments if they are accessible to all than more treatments if they are affordable to only a few

That's a false choice. You're sacrificing innovation to solve an access problem that money alone can't fix. Countries with price controls—Germany, Canada—still innovate less than the US. Subsidies don't replace the profit motive's ruthlessness. You'd rather have fewer cures that treat nobody well than more cures that treat some people. That's losing on both fronts.