You should extend this line of reasoning to other goods. Pay 10x for your food, too, so someone else could get theirs for less. Pay $50 per gallon of gas, stuff like that.
The op's POV might seem cruel, but only if you're in an ivory tower. There are _plenty_ of people right here in the US who can't afford drugs because we insist that they should be 10x the price in the US than everywhere else.
In fact, I'd say those people comprise a _majority_ of US healthcare consumers, due to just how unequal the incomes are.
There's also another negative side effect: due to what amounts to dumping, other countries essentially don't have any pharma research of their own, likely because it wouldn't be profitable. That includes pretty much all of them other than Switzerland (where both the health insurance and drugs are pretty expensive).
> There are _plenty_ of people right here in the US who can't afford drugs because we insist that they should be 10x the price in the US than everywhere else.
The very article explains this isn't true, as drug price doesn't really correlate with R&D costs.
> There's also another negative side effect: due to what amounts to dumping, other countries essentially don't have any pharma research of their own
That's wrong, too. According to [0], U.S. pharma companies globally spent about 70 billions, of which about 11 billions were spent in Western Europe, so net amount was at most (assuming nothing was spent outside the US and Western Europe) 59 billion dollars.
By comparison, according to [1], R&D spend from national companies from Germany, Switzerland, UK and France were about 20 billion USD.
So the population adjusted R&D spend relation is lower than 1:2 between Western Europe and the US.
The op's POV might seem cruel, but only if you're in an ivory tower. There are _plenty_ of people right here in the US who can't afford drugs because we insist that they should be 10x the price in the US than everywhere else.
In fact, I'd say those people comprise a _majority_ of US healthcare consumers, due to just how unequal the incomes are.
There's also another negative side effect: due to what amounts to dumping, other countries essentially don't have any pharma research of their own, likely because it wouldn't be profitable. That includes pretty much all of them other than Switzerland (where both the health insurance and drugs are pretty expensive).