I support price controls in the US, and the government manufacturing generics if necessary (stepping in if the private sector won't due to it not being profitable enough).

EDIT: I removed an unrelated paragraph about Planned Parenthood and drug supply chain I thought was out of scope.

These companies are international so they can choose to not do business with a country. It is a negotiation, just one that governments tend to do better at. If Blue Cross North Dakota sits down at the negotiating table and then Aetna New York sits down at the negotiating table and then Canada sits down and then the European Union sits down, who is going to win a good deal and who is going to get screwed?

You can say it's cheating when governments win lower prices for their citizens like this but I'm not much inclined to care. I don't want to subsidize the continuation of our more-market-based-than-usual health care experiment when the results have been clear for decades. Compared to our peers, we're in a hole. Let's stop digging.

So that assertion is only sorta true.

Initial discovery research is pretty much entirely tax payer funded. There's then a second phase, moving from that discovery to POC, that is extremely underfunded, and which a lot of charity and such funding goes toward. It's only the last phase, taking POCs -> product, that companies really invest in. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/

Now, that capital investment is not a trivial amount of money (about 80 billion in 2018 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/265085/research-and-deve... ), but it still is only 17% of drug company revenues - https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060115/how-much-dru...

Note, too, that private companies tend to fund research toward common first world diseases, since they're profit driven, and far less to niche and/or common third world diseases. So not only do they not fund early discovery (government does that), nor generally moving those discoveries to POCs ('valley of death', and charitable foundations and the like do that), they also leave plenty of potential meds untouched, since the likely profitability is low.

I've heard that argument, not sure how much I buy it. Seems the drugs that get developed tend towards niche applications, while common diseases that affect mostly uninsured people are addressed by places like the Gates foundation.

The NIH already funds a significant amount of drug R&D in the US.

If this is true, what is the point of US consumers subsidizing the R&D is they themselves cannot benefit from it.

That’s why we should tie our drug prices to the prices other countries pay. I believe Trump did that (or talked about doing it?) for Medicare, but it’s absolutely insane we haven’t done it across the board.

Republicans would be hesitant due to “regulations bad,” and Democrats don’t want to improve our current system because they’d rather throw it out. And of course both sides get donations from pharma.