Patents last for about 25 years, but important innovations have returns far into the future, hundreds of years. At that rate, you would very often be better off accumulating interest on capital anyways.

Notwithstanding the nature of scientific progress as an accumulation of smaller experiences (each individually harder to justify with a profit motive).

Indeed, even privately funded research is often openly published, such as the now-famous paper "attention is all you need". There's just not that much to gain from keeping every single thing under wraps. More to gain with openness.

It's also not practical to keep those facts as trade secrets over the several decades over which their applications need to develop. Even if an industry consortium was willing to discover that clouds are made of water droplets, it would certainly leak before the science of meteorology had progressed far enough for that consortium to offer saleable rain forecasts.

Finally, companies are unwilling to train people about basic facts. Academia is the only system where "and then you tell everybody" is a part of the incentive structure. Privately, you have a strong incentive to reveal nothing and punish leakers.

To imply that private companies reap the rewards of basic research without contribute much is ignoring the many other components of translational work.

Second, biotech/pharma actually already do invest quite a lot in R&D. But they tend to focus on translational work rather than speculative exploration, because it is less risky.

That was a lie to justify insurance price gouging.

Funding the research privately increases costs to end user as private ensurer is directly accruing more cost. Research stopping increases costs to end user as new/novel cures/treatments aren't found.

Cost for consumer goes up because of lost opportunity cost of 1) learning to diagnose earlier 2) finding new or cheaper cures/treatments.

You can make the argument 'But other countries will pick up the slack!' - but that doesn't necessarily help either, why would they give us the results of their research cheaper? US already jacked up pricing via an executive order on drug pricing just this year to knock that.

Publicly funded medical research is an absolute positive for the US general public health and wallets. We're all losing here on both ends of the spectrum ($$ and actual general public health).

Talking about rebuilding after just shifts this problem instead of solving it. When you start to spin things back up, who's at the front of the line looking for new grant money?

Most research is still following a medical model that worked for infectious diseases in the 1950s but does not yield any meaningful information or treatments for chronic, complex disorders that have multiple interrelated factors.

And since doctors are trained primarily in the treatment of acute diseases, even the useful information that’s found by research is largely ignored in practice. The ignorance of the average MD about chronic illnesses is astounding.

I’ve been sick for the last two years and I’ve given up going to doctors. They are a waste of my time. I’ve done much better by doing my own research and treating myself. Much of what’s helped has been stuff that I’ve seen described as pseudoscience, even though it’s empirically based, because there aren’t enough RCTs for it to qualify as “evidence”. This makes me incredibly angry.

The system is utterly broken. I’d like to scrap the whole thing and start over. Hopefully, we’ll find a way to start over when the smoke clears.

That or they would rather simply ignore biology in service of this or that politically-motivated special interest, and put off any problems for the next generation to deal with.

It’s not a business. Its job is clearly outlined in the preamble of the constitution.