> Why don’t these countries strive to become better then the US?

Because the US will bomb the shit out of them if they do. E.g. Clinton threatened to impose trade sanctions on India if they took steps to treat the few people who (at the time) had HIV rather than letting it become an epidemic.

Or just look at Iran, Cuba, any central American country, etc.

> E.g. Clinton threatened to impose trade sanctions on India if they took steps to treat the few people who (at the time) had HIV rather than letting it become an epidemic.

I'd be really interested in learning more about this. Source?

Here's an article about South Africa, which was the other country involved:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/dec/19/theobserver.uknew...

I can't find a good source online about India, although it's mentioned in passing here:

https://www.law.upenn.edu/journals/jil/articles/volume17/iss...

I think there is a bit of a fundamental difference between "we'll start a trade war if you treat this disease in your country" and "we'll start a trade war if you steal the product of tens of billions of dollars of R&D (to treat this disease in your country)". Namely, with one you can still treat the disease - just not by ignoring US patents, paying a trivial royalty, and manufacturing the drugs yourselves. (Which I'm also not confident would have actually halted the epidemic - South Africa is not particularly well known for their pharmaceutical industry, and that stuff's harder than you'd expect)

And IMO "AIDS is an epidemic, we're declaring an emergency" is about as credible as "Global Warming is a catastrophe, we're declaring an emergency" or "Illegal Immigration is huge, we're declaring an emergency".