Medicare’s Taxpayer-Funded Layaway Plan
At the courthouse-basement level of policy math, the arrangement is hard to defend: taxpayers help absorb the early risk of medical discovery, then a private patent can put the finished medicine behind a padlock while Medicare and patients meet the checkout price.
That is a taxpayer-funded layaway plan. We help finance the scientific groundwork, a company controls the bottle, and the public returns to retrieve its medicine with a bill wearing a shareholder-return hat. If public support helps make a breakthrough possible, public policy should at least ask what public value comes back. Otherwise, we did not merely buy the breakthrough; we rented it back from the company that put a padlock on the bottle.