The drug companies are in a situation where lowering the prices will mean they have to lower rebates, which means they won’t get picked up by insurances where t

The drug companies are in a situation where lowering the prices will mean they have to lower rebates, which means they won’t get picked up by insurances where the competition is on rebates not on list-price, this in turn means they reach fewer patients.. Drug companies can lower prices but it doesn’t help anyone because they aren’t selling directly to consumers at the list prices unless they decide to completely ignore the entire insured population. Which is basically the same as just straight up announcing that they are closing shop. Imagine if Apple tomorrow announced that they where going to stop selling phones to anyone who has a medical insurance in order to provide cheaper phones to those who aren’t insured. Imagine how fast their stock and company would implode. The drug companies want to reach the uninsured population however so they are pushing for things like selling biosimilars under different price schemes or selling cheap alternatives directly to consumers. Drug producers do have a social responsibility, but that responsibility has to be seen in the light of reaching the patients. Right now the consumer market in the US is split into insured/uninsured and through the list-price/rebate shenanigans the middlemen are controlling access to both segments. And the structure of the rebates has put them in a situation where they aren’t representing the consumers in negotiations because higher prices allow higher rebates which never get passed on to the consumers.