[rokhayakebe]

You know you are correct. When a photo sharing app sells for billions everyone interviews the founders and praises them. When you save 10 lives and charge billions you are a criminal. I am not sure which one is right or wrong, but it certainly isn't fair to the drug makers.

[tuna-piano]

You summarize my feelings exactly, in a very clear way that demonstrates the absurdity of the situation.

[dasil003]

In a vacuum it appears absurd, but to understand why people feel this way, you have to look at the big picture of health care costs spiraling out of control and people literally having to choose between food or meds. Middle class people without health insurance and good retirement savings can end up in poverty because of an unexpected illness. Any attempt at health insurance reform gets twisted and maimed into baseless political showboating—I know several people who voted for Trump because they actually believe he can lower their health insurance bills, the fools.

When people think of a photo sharing app they are thinking of breezy fun social media times. When people think of rare disease treatments the sentiment is much darker a priori. I'm not saying drug companies are to blame for the current situation (hate the game not the player), but emotionally it's obvious why there is judgement about profiting from that situation.

[rayiner]

The problem with the typical person's view of this issue is that it confuses two very different things: price and affordability. Drugs should be priced at a level such that pricing them higher doesn't create enough additional benefit from new drugs to outweigh the extra cost, and pricing them lower causes loss in the benefit from new drugs to outweigh the savings from lower price. That should be decided at a society-wide level.

Affordability is then about transferring money from rich people to poor people so they can buy the appropriately-priced drug.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Well - technically affordability would be more about not transferring money from poor people to rich people without an exceptionally good reason.

A common problem with these arguments is the assumption that they take something from the rich. The reality is the cycle started earlier, and redistribution is a necessary correction to that, not an outrageous and immoral imposition on a presumed natural order.

[rayiner]

There is no economic system in which the skilled educated labor necessary to create these drugs can be compensated by what money you can get from a relatively small number of poor people with s rare disease. You cut $300,000 per year for treatment to $30,000 per year, and this company is operating at huge losses. And it's still not affordable to even normal people.

[thwarted]

When a photo sharing app sells for billions everyone interviews the founders and praises them.

In most of these cases, they've sold something for billions to a single entity that has the money and doesn't strictly need it (for example, if Youtube had not sold to Google it would have been an existential crisis for Youtube, not for Google).

When you save 10 lives and charge billions you are a criminal.

In these ten sales, you've made billions by charging each of the individuals 1/10th of the billions, individuals who don't have the money and do strictly need it.

There's a difference between "sells for billions" and "charges billions": in the former in the case of photo sharing apps, it's a buyer's market, and in the later it's a seller's market.

The founders, the sellers, might get praised in the event of a billion dollar photo sharing app sale, but few have sympathy for the purchasing party in that transaction, no matter what they paid, because it's a buyer's market.

I'm not sure fair, to the drug makers or otherwise, enters into it. These are not really that comparable, and only appear to be due to the scale of the sales both being "billions".