Research isn't cheap. Testing isn't cheap. Marketing isn't cheap. Manufacturing, distribution, the list goes on. There has to be a financial incentive to bu

Research isn't cheap. Testing isn't cheap. Marketing isn't cheap. Manufacturing, distribution, the list goes on. There has to be a financial incentive to build an infrastructure around a product. Add in that access is highly controlled, meaning that there is significant IT and non-IT security infrastructure that needs to be in place throughout the life cycle of a given drug. There will always be instances that are easy to politicize - pick your favorite disease and there's a company with an overly expensive drug on the market. But what happens when the financial incentive to innovate goes away? There are cheap drugs all over the third world. Not too many of them were developed there. A major change in how the industry worked would be a significant event that I'm not ready for, and I don't think the rest of the world is either. It will take years for new economic strategies to build - and not all of those strategies will be consumer friendly. Today the solution is that access to expensive drugs is subsidized by insurance which is subsidized by law. It's not the best solution, but it's a working solution. The political and economic climate that we have tells me that we'll talk about change for another decade and look to actually implement some sort of real change sometime 20-40 years from now as the industry ages and stabilizes. You have to remember how young "modern medicine" actually is. Rabbit tests for pregnancy aren't that far back in our history. We're still at the point where compulsory sterilization is seen as a reasonable resolution to problems. We're mere decades away from a time when companies like Baxter and Abbot enjoyed an almost competition free environment and not too long before that, heroin was a common ingredient in cough remedies and parasites were commonly sold weight loss solutions.