This would be my gut reaction too, reading about this in more detail has made me think the issue is more subtle than that. My point is, if you don't regulate a market, can you expect a market to regulate itself?

If you have to be forced in order to act moral, you're immoral. People can call corporations "amoral" all day long, but they're made of people, and their decision to not be moral also implies the decision to be immoral.

No market will ever regulate itself when the product is life or death. People will always choose life at any price. This is why most civilized countries provide health care for everybody.

That is the ideal world of some people, the invisible hand of the market regulating it blah blah. However there's never been a single instance where this has actually happened, markets have to be regulated by an outside power (namely, governments).

EDIT 1: Apologies @pikzen. Edited to agree with you :). I should read more carefully on a Friday morning. EDIT 2: And you :).

I agree, there are plenty of examples where regulation works. The National Health Service in the UK is a shining example of this (it has its own issues but what can you expect when you are running one of the largest organisations in the world?). There are succesful regulations that reward companies (such as with subsidies and other indirect incentives) to choose the 'morally correct' option (this is done for example in the EU to limit environmental impact of industry).

Edit: @martijn_himself, in all fairness, my limited-sleep-friday-morning messages may be a bit unclear too. Cheers and have a good day.

I believe we're saying the same thing. Regulations are needed, and we cannot expect companies or the market to do it themselves.

Regulations? The government itself was buying the stuff! Why are regulations needed for the government to not pay more than it should?

Because Congress deliberately passed bills that prevented the government from bargaining with pharmaceutical companies, because those same companies pay into re-election campaigns.

If anything needs regulation, it's campaign finance.

We're in agreement, then. This is a problem in the governmental apparatus itself, not a lack of market regulations.

No disagreement on the need to regulate campaign finance, either.