I think you kind of gloss over the core issue that most people have with drug prices. I don't think most people have a problem with pharmaceutical companies pri

I think you kind of gloss over the core issue that most people have with drug prices. I don't think most people have a problem with pharmaceutical companies pricing drugs such that they pay for the R&D costs (or more generally the overhead) of the company plus some reasonable profit margin. The problem is that with the inelastic demand inherent in life-or-death treatments, there is no incentive for pharmaceutical companies to stop there. If pricing a pill at $200 could cover costs and provide 30% profit margin, why not double the cost and make a 50% profit margin? Or triple the cost and make a 60% profit margin? With inelastic demand that is governed only by a person's ability to pay, rather than their willingness to pay or competition, the demand drops far slower relative to the increase in price compared to normal supply-and-demand economics. It's the tendency (or at least perceived tendency) of taking advantage of someone's desire to live to extract as much money from them as possible in order to increase profit margins that people tend to have a problem with. This is called exploitation. I think it's a bit disingenuous to spin outcry over how expensive a drug is (in a relative sense) as being a simplistic outcry over a drug just being expensive (in an absolute sense). That said, it's possible that some of it comes from the fact that R&D is so expensive, and a pharmaceutical company never really knows how long their drug will be bought before some other company discovers something that outperforms it. I am by no means an expert on pharmaceutical company economics. EDIT: And the above argument is just one possible argument to make if you assume that drug development should be a function of capitalism in the first place. There's another viewpoint that drug development shouldn't be a responsibility of capitalism at all, in part because perverse incentives often times unavoidable in capitalism are especially unethical when applied to people's health.