You’re assuming that the return pharma companies get is the absolute minimum they would be prepared to accept in order to do R&D, but I suspect there’s quite a

You’re assuming that the return pharma companies get is the absolute minimum they would be prepared to accept in order to do R&D, but I suspect there’s quite a lot of slack that the regulator could take in. The FCC fixed the price that AT&T could charge back in the monopoly days yet Bell Labs continued to churn out research for the benefit of humanity.