Everything else being horrendously expensive does exert an upward lift on pharma prices. Yes, pharma does gouge Americans, no doubt about it. This is not easy

Everything else being horrendously expensive does exert an upward lift on pharma prices. Yes, pharma does gouge Americans, no doubt about it. This is not easy to analyze with complements vs substitutes. Sometimes drugs can be substitutes for other treatments, and sometimes they are complements. Also, people may be desperately needing one or the other or both. It's not like quitting coffee when the prices are high. Say that for a certain drug and certain set of medical treatments, they are complementary. If the treatment is jacked up to be expensive, less of it will be performed, and that will create less demand for the drug. So you would think the drug would go cheaper. But the drug vendors can simply use their market power (say it is a patented drug with no generic version available) to stick to their guns and jack their prices too. Then they exert the reverse effect; the more expensive drug will put downward pressure on the complementary treatment. In this manner, both the drug and the procedures can gradually become expensive together. Though each one is not as expensive as it would be if the other didn't move.