You hate to see it

If you have any question now of Kamala’s commitment to Israel then there’s no hope.

Regulation on pharma pricing is a super interesting topic. On one hand, it’s ideal for the government to stay out markets as they can meaningfully distort what gets invested in, competitive dynamics, the quality of products, and more. However, in the case of drugs, we have a complex problem where the government effectively creates temporary monopolies for pharma companies (in the form of patents), and for good reason: we should reward the risk and R&D it takes to invent new drugs. But, if you have a market that has monopolies on entire products that are non-fungible, then the producer essentially can come up with any pricing they want without any downward competitive pressure on pricing. In a profit maximizing business, you aim to find the most optimal price that the market will support for the greatest amount of volume of that product to produce maximum return. Price too high, many customers don’t show up. Price too low, and you’re leaving money on the table. Assuming pharma works in a perfect market then drugs would be priced to find the most number of people that will pay the highest price. And I’m sure they pretty much are. But, because there’s no competition keeping prices low, by definition that price will be high enough that many people will not be able to afford the drug. If they can’t afford the drug, then you have a question as a society of what to do. Assuming you want to live in a world where everyone (within reason) should have the opportunity to get life-saving or life-changing medicine, then someone is going to subsidize this cost for others. Now, if we’re subsidizing the cost of medicine, we have an even less elastic market for pricing, because now people are buying on others’ behalves. So at some point, eventually someone other than the patient is paying for that medicine. Which means inevitably pharma pricing essentially just becomes a tax on all of us. Given it’s a tax, and it’s due to the government’s ability to grant effective monopolies, it might make sense that we would have some limits on how much this tax should cost? There’s no question the producers, inventors, employees, and shareholders should make gobs of money when they create breakthroughs; but I think we can also have sane conversations about pricing and regulation here. Ultimately, this is a very complex topic (this barely scratches the surface), but I think we need to be able to talk about regulation in a sane way without always shouting about any government action being communist 🙃.