It's not just that, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernisation Act bars Medicare from negotiating drug prices.

How is that?

Nation-sized leverage. The same reason why equivalent pharmaceuticals are cheaper elsewhere in the world.

Quite. That’s why the US pays for more pharmaceutical and medical device R&D than anyone else. The US is where every pharmaceutical company makes the profits that incentivize further drug development.

Or, in the case of Valeant Pharmaceuticals they just jacked the prices up after buying smaller drug companies and getting rid of all the R&D teams ... that doesn't seem to have incentivized further drug development by them, did it?

You are speaking of a specific anecdotal experience and he is talking about the industry in aggregate. Neither of you are invalidating the other's point.

The actual facts are in support of the posters point: https://www.abpi.org.uk/facts-and-figures/science-and-innova...

But your example is a real occurrence of abuse under the US system.

Nation-sized leverage? Piffle. Pass a law that Big Pharma can't price higher in the US than the lowest price negotiated elsewhere. Boom, problem solved.

From 2003 to maybe 2019 Medicare was explicitly forbidden from negotiating drug prices. Second bullet point in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Prescription_Drug,_Im...

The first world has successfully encouraged the drug makers to sell their product cheaper in the third world. If you look on wikipedia drug articles you'll see the price for the generic in the developed and developing world.

That's the problem... The political conditions that preclude passage of such a law.