> The fundamental flaw you're making is US citizen = rich, which is factually incorrect. Especially if you expect them to subsidize medical care world-wide. Pr

> The fundamental flaw you're making is US citizen = rich, which is factually incorrect. Especially if you expect them to subsidize medical care world-wide. Price discrimination is only a subsidy if the drug manufacturers are selling the drug below cost in poor countries, therefore losing money on it. What's the marginal cost of the drug itself? I imagine it's pretty cheap, so the company makes a profit either way. Why would they sell in poor countries, if it loses them money? I see the cost of a drug as two parts: the one-time, large research cost, and the marginal cost per-treatment. The former is quite big (hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars), while the latter is quite small. This is why companies can afford such price discrimination. I can't really understand what kind of subsidy you're seeing here, except maybe for how poor countries get to benefit off research paid by rich country patients. Is that it? > Nonsense. The poorest people who would forgo life-saving drugs for financial reasons by definition have no money. I don't think that they really have "no money". The question is how much money they have. The Walmart worker in your example would probably be able to afford the treatment at India prices. The problem is that you can't easily do individual price discrimination in the same country. You can't sell the drug cheaply to the poor US worker, and very expensively to the American millionaire (if you could, that itself would be the solution to everyone's problems). > And once again, if you want to help those people in other countries, by all means propose a bill to explicitly subsidize medicine in those countries. But take the money to fund it from this country's rich rather than its poor. Drug companies don't take money from either rich or poor, they take it from whoever needs the drugs. Now if you're proposing government-funded or -operated drug research, that's another discussion. Otherwise, I don't see what the rich have to do with the economics of medical drugs. Also, after posting my previous comment, I realized I can make a good economic argument for price discrimination. When you look at countries as independent markets that a drug company operates in, the company will set the per-country price for each drug at the point where the profits for each country are maximized. In reality, the countries are not independent markets. The existence of black market for drugs in richer countries (where individuals smuggle in cheaper versions of a drug) should have a positive effect: it pulls the price down, due to the competition (because the company now has to compete with its own drug, it has to lower the price). The only real problem here is that, in many cases, it's either illegal or very difficult to move drugs across borders.