Pharma companies receive very little (relatively) in terms of grants or research funding.
R&D spending can be amortized as a business expense when calculating a tax bill, so I suppose that could be repealed, raising the effective tax rate.
The price signals are already broken. The people doing the research that is fundamental to pharmaceuticals are paid by grants which aren't connected to the price signals. There is a market failure here.
So for the market it looks like 99% of the cost comes after academic research but in reality that's only 40-60% of it.
At the end of the day the price signal doesn't even reach most of the ressources and it is itself a poor proxy for the metric we actually want to optimize, which would be something like QALY.
You dont have to imagine a top down economy and fail to find examples, when simply regulation would do the trick and keep some enterprise freedom.
> The beer must be brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery, either by the monks themselves or under their supervision.
> The brewery must be of secondary importance within the monastery and it should witness to the business practices proper to a monastic way of life.
> The brewery is not intended to be a profit-making venture. The income covers the living expenses of the monks and the maintenance of the buildings and grounds. Whatever remains is donated to charity for social work and to help persons in need.
It's funny to see above the suits and ties a layer of habits and scapulars[1]
https://www.koningshoeven.nl/media/127/compilatie-inkleding....
I.e. in my native Germany, health expenditure per capita is 2/3 of what it is in the U.S. if faced with a life-threatening illness, I would vastly prefer to be in Germany than in the U.S. (with the possible exception of being super-rich and being able to buy top-of-the-line health care).
It is not really an open market with competition: the government creates incentives, and only a faction of the increased cost to buyers goes into what the incentives are supposed to support.
Any useful information from price signals is lost too amid bad incentives: https://pietersz.co.uk/2007/01/pharmaceutical-incentives-dev...
However, it is hard to find real examples that bear this out. I think that this View overestimates the capability of institutions and underestimates the utility of price signals and an open market with competition.