pharmaceutical companies are granted a monopoly on their IP (as everyone else is) because of the extensive, expensive, long term research required to develop th

pharmaceutical companies are granted a monopoly on their IP (as everyone else is) because of the extensive, expensive, long term research required to develop the IP. manufacturing costs are almost trivial compared to the costs of R&D--that is to say, there isn't much improvement to be made there. retail costs can go down, as they do in the rest of the world when governments set price controls, but if every country on earth set a low price on pharmaceuticals, you would begin to worry that these companies would no longer have an incentive to innovate, which is potentially as or more dangerous than the status quo insofar as newer treatments would be less likely to occur in our lifetime.