There's a huge issue with pricing today. It used to be that drug companies were ethical about the "your money or your life" nature of medicine. Merck once even

There's a huge issue with pricing today. It used to be that drug companies were ethical about the "your money or your life" nature of medicine. Merck once even gave a drug away for free because it was the right thing to do [1]. Nowadays it's about charging what the market can bear. The trouble is that drugs have gotten way more expensive to develop for a variety of mostly scientific reasons. This means a "prize" mentality has developed where each drug is like a lottery ticket, and you best get the most out of that ticket if it wins. There's also a sense across the industry that price controls are going to come, so ramp the prices up now so when the controls arrive they won't gut the industry. Also sometimes drugs have to cost as much as they do because they're just very hard to make (see gene therapy), but at this point the pharmaceutical industry has squandered all the public trust they had with recent rapacious practices (see insulin, opioids). Fundamentally there are good reasons drugs cost a fair amount of money, but it's not necessarily clear that costing this much money is justifiable. I believe drug companies can do good while doing well, but that it takes a leadership interested in more than boosting the margins as high as possible. We need a code of ethics for drug and med device companies, maybe something along the lines of the hippocratic oath. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/22/world/merck-offers-free-distribution-of-new-river-blindness-drug.html https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/22/world/merck-offers-free-d...