[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.