Superbugs: disastrously misaligned incentives:

William Hall and others write: 

When asked what she would do with a useful new antibiotic, the chief medical officer for England, Sally Davis, said that the drug “would need a stewardship program”—that is, that systems would have to be in place to make sure that the antibiotic was only prescribed when absolutely necessary. Indeed, limiting unnecessary use is essential to keep bacteria from becoming resistant to new antibiotics, and thus essential for our continued health.

While this is a cogent strategy, it doesn’t coincide with the marketing goals of the drug industry: “When a really useful new antibiotic is found, the company that invests in it cannot rely on high sales for return on investment.”  William Hall et al, Superbugs: an arms race against bacteria, quoted by Jerome Groopman, The bugs are winning, 'New York Review of Books', dated 28 June

The interests of the drug companies - and of those who target, implictly or explicitly GDP - don't merely fail to coincide: they are in conflict with each other. Discovering and manufacturing a new antibiotic is expensive so, when a pharmaceutical company succeeds, it has every incentive to maximise sales in the relatively short period before its patent runs out. With such misaligned objectives, you'd hope government would take the long view and give the health of its citizens (and, incidentally, the welfare of farm animals fed prodigious quantities of antibiotics so that they'll grow more rapidly) a higher priority than the short-term interests of pharmaceutical companies. But no: it's the farmers and the pharmas who override the interests of ordinary people. You know, those of us who can't afford to follow and manipulate an absurdly complex policymaking process, nor pay others to do so.

The authors of Superbugs estimate that the total number of people dying annually from resistant microbes is at least 1.5 million and, extrapolating from US estimates, they estimate the costs to health services at about $57 billion and the loss in world productivity at $174 billion. There are currently no financial incentives for anyone to take the long-term view, though it's in almost everybody's interests for somebody - most likely government - actually to do so. As individuals, we know what needs to be done: ensure that doses of antibiotics are carefully regulated and that research into new antibiotics continues. Developing effective antibiotics, Hall et al write, should be recognised as a public good, which would justify government intervention. They blame short-term thinking for the absence of such intervention.

Applying the Social Policy Bond principle to the health field could be one way of meeting the challenge, and might be easier and less contentious for government to do than more direct intervention. Government could issue Health Bonds aiming for improvements in the general health of the population over a period of decades. One necessary approach would then be to optimise the use of, and research into antibiotics. Doing this would generate rises in the value of the bonds, and so reward investors. Government would have to do little more than raise the funds for the bonds' redemption and articulate, with the help of experts and input from the public, health goals for the population. After that, it would be up to bondholders to pursue these goals. The overarching objective of investors in the bonds would then coincide with those broad, long-term goals. The investors, and the people they contract, would have incentives to bring about society's health goals as efficiently as possible - a stark contrast with the current system.