Why don’t the pharma companies just make more?
“Why don’t the pharma companies just make more?”
Do you mean so they can satisfy the demands of countries with a price cap? Because they supply those drugs at less than they cost. America is forcing drug companies to subsidize the socialized medicine of other countries. Why? Politics. Or do you mean why don’t they make more here and lower the price? Because why would they do that? There’s only so much demand and they get to charge whatever they want for some defined period. Thus, they can limit their costs to produce by keeping the quantity low. Companies don’t generally do things for the sake of being a good citizen. They optimize their income even at the expense of people’s lives.
I worked as an engineer for Honeywell. There was a simple change we could have made. changing the value of a few resistors, that would have saved the customer millions of dollars. The customer didn’t have the budget for what Honeywell would have charged, even though the actual cost to Honeywell was peanuts. I suggested we do it as patriotic taxpayers. They literally laughed at me.