As billionaires self-aggrandize through inheritances, subsidies and tax breaks, they fund really stupid projects that make them more money, but offer the public no benefits.
Most innovation arises from public funding. Whether it’s the transistor, the new and widely used 3D transistor, solar panels, lithium-ion batteries, the internet, the smart phone, integrated circuits, electronic design automation, prescription drugs, CRISPR gene editing, the biotech industry, etc. – they all arise from government funding and support, mostly at our universities, especially at our public universities, of which Berkeley excels. Arrogant billionaires, suffering from the Power Paradox, think they know better.
As billionaires make more money and pay little or no taxes, the ability to fund independent, academic researchers through public funding is dwindling. Luring scientists and physicians from academia with large paychecks, billionaires are seeking huge returns by developing more drugs. Given that most prescription drugs don’t work and cause harm, and that most diseases have environmental causes, which is ignored by private enterprise, the shift of “research” funding to private, for profit entities instead of public, non-profit entities will further the profit-driven motives and poor performance of the world’s most expensive and worst healthcare system. It’s a privatized system and has been for a long time. And it’s becoming more privatized with worse outcomes. Private equity takeovers by billionaires are part of the problem. Let’s just forget about the 900 widely used chemicals that are involved in causing breast cancer – let’s make drugs and lots of money instead. Remember, steep rises in cancer and other diseases means the diseases are environmentally caused and not genetic in their origin.
If you think I’m exaggerating about prescription drugs and medical procedures mostly not working, look at the evidence. There’s an epidemic of needless stenting and the associated drugs used during and after the procedure. Likewise for the epidemics of C-sections and antidepressant drugs. For example, a new study has found that fluoxetine (Prozac) for adolescents, the placebo effect predicted good outcomes, but the actual drug treatment did not. Cancer drugs – most don’t work, it’s bad, and many people are also misdiagnosed with cancer and irradiated, which of course can cause cancer. And those C-sections result in dysbiosis of the baby, and, as published in JAMA, possibly colorectal cancer. The epidemic of C-sections, contributing to an epidemic of cancer, and an epidemic of drug use. It’s a bonanza for physicians and corporations.
Part of the problem is that physicians are incented to sell drugs and do procedures. They are the sales people for the drug companies. Only they can sell the prescription drugs, and that’s how they make their money- selling drugs. Part of the problem too is that those selling the prescription drugs, physicians, don’t understand that most drugs lack good evidence for safety and efficacy, with many studies being fraudulent and/or poorly designed. They don’t understand the FDA approval process. according to the journal Health Affairs, “Our findings suggest that physicians commonly lack familiarity with drug and medical device regulatory practices and are under the impression that the data supporting FDA drug and high-risk device approvals are more rigorous than they often are.” Incented to make money at all levels by selling drugs is a big part of the problem. Do we think a health institute funded by a private equity (Bain Capital) billionaire will help solve these problems or add to them? Private equity specializes in making our healthcare system worse than it already was.
Instead of spending money on the key determinants of disease, namely environmental factors (exposome), which doesn’t make money for billionaires, another institute has been created by billionaires to develop money-making drugs. It’s the standard model in the USA, make drugs that treat symptoms, with the new drugs causing adverse events. Then treat the symptoms of the adverse event with another drug, that then causes another adverse event. Continue this cycle throughout people’s lives, until the time when they reach gerontological status, and the billionaires become richer as the gerontological patients is on average taking 15 prescription drugs. Code name for this cascade of prescriptions is “polypharmacy.” Never mind the prevalence of inappropriate medication used by the elderly people has found to be from 11.5-62.5%.
In “Realizing the True Cost of Billionaire Philanthropy,” Bella DeVaan and her colleagues reveal some of the problems. “For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the twenty-first century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.” Indeed, critics have argued that many donors, impatient with the deliberate pace of public science, are ignoring basic research in favor of more popular, feel-good projects. And billionaires profit from tax breaks to the institutes and from contracts and eventual profits realized from their “tax-breaked research.”
What results? The same old billionaire-funded crap we’ve seen for years, like the much ballyhooed, but failed biotech company that Leroy Hood, M.D., started and destroyed on a really stupid idea.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 