Maybe the public could help them substantially lower the costs by not allowing to advertise prescription drugs to laypeople?
Agree with the GP. There is some massive Stockholm syndrome going on here.
Some countries have well-functioning health care systems since the 18XX, not just since the feel-good story of "Murica is subsidizing other countries because we are such a great nation" became a thing.
Working health care is not rocket science, but it looks like everything that doesn't fit the American narrative of exceptionalism is conveniently ignored these days.
That argument, though oft-repeated, is mathematically non-sensical. Unless companies are currently operating irrationally, one less dollar spent on advertising will result in more than one dollar lost in revenue.
See the Opioid epidemic that is still taking lives in the US for more than 20 years. Imagine what an economic benefit it would be for the populace if all those average middle-class Jane and John Does wouldn't have had their life shattered by addiction and instead would be holding down a steady job paying taxes.
Or imagine how much cheaper it would be if the US' reckless abuse of antibiotics in both humans and livestock wouldn't cause such a rise of multi-resistant strains of diseases.
You're treating this as if it's a question of "fairness" to the drug companies, and it's not about that at all. If you could drive drug company profits to $0 with no collateral effects, it'd be unambiguously the right thing to do.
The question is, though, what does that do to the market? If you're an investor that has a billion dollars lying around, do you put it into drug development or social media? Both are highly risky, but the former is burdened by a regulatory regime that thinks companies in that sector should just "scrape by," while the latter has unlimited upside.
You're basically sending a signal to the market that the more valuable your business is to society, the less money you're going to make from engaging in it. That's ass backwards.
> Seriously, if drug companies were making a net loss in European and other countries, they'd just stop supplying in those countries and subsequently enjoy higher profits
They continue to sell in European countries because they don't make a marginal loss there. But if their revenue levels in the U.S. were at the level they are in Europe, they absolutely could not justify their enormous fixed costs.
> And prices the US pay are in no way related to what other countries pay: it's simply a function of market power and being in a much weaker bargaining position.
It's true that drug companies are in a much weaker bargaining position in European countries, but only because European governments exercise seller-side market power to artificially drive prices below what they would be in a market with many buyers and many sellers.
> I realise Pfizer (net income: $7.74 billion) and Merck & Co (net income: $4.44 billion)
Fun fact: Facebook's net income is about 30% higher than Pfizer's even though its total revenue is only about half. Obviously Facebook's product is much more valuable to the world and should be incentivized accordingly.