You seem very poorly informed about the subject. While I don't agree with the vast amount of lobbying a lot of pharma companies do, which in itself increases costs, the costs of R&D and the process of approval are huge.
Get rid of drug patents, bye bye new drugs without direct g'vmt funding. Drugs are trivial to reverse engineer, incredibly expensive to invent.
There is also a massive amount of drugs that go nowhere, often even failing at major trail stage, so the successes pay for the failures.
The problem is that the govt is providing an artificial barrier to entry by other companies which protects the profits of the big pharma. Because of it the pharma companies have no incentive to reduce prices . They would rather spend the money on lobbying
Very true, so it's ironic that so many posters in this thread are advocating knee-jerk solutions that hand even more of the pharmaceutical industry over to the government.
Our government is fundamentally broken and the source of a good portion of the problems in the health care industry... so let's sprinkle some more government in there!
Seriously, the government has plenty that it can do by providing more transparency in the industry, streamlining and correcting problems in the Patent office and at the FDA, stopping collusion and price fixing, and examining the length of patent-granting-monopolies to ensure that profiteering isn't too far out of whack.
Get rid of drug patents, bye bye new drugs without direct g'vmt funding. Drugs are trivial to reverse engineer, incredibly expensive to invent.
There is also a massive amount of drugs that go nowhere, often even failing at major trail stage, so the successes pay for the failures.