[marcosdumay]

> Or big pharma said, we’re not selling to government, they are telling us to depress prices, we disagree!

Big pharma has said this many times to many governments. When Brazil started to negotiate, we had to invalidate patents so somebody would sell the drugs.

[mc32]

Do you think that was the right and consistent decision and did you agree with it?

[marcosdumay]

What decision?

The pharma industries were acting like perfect assholes, denying their product to people that need it for strong-arming them into unreasonable prices. But that's entirely dependent on the details, they could be as well just be negotiating a fair price and the description above wouldn't change a bit.

The government was well within its right to invalidate the patents for protecting its people. That again is dependent on the details, it could be an antieconomical action against the freedom of initiative and still have the same description. The fact that those same pharma companies currently get more profit than they did at the time, by selling a much larger amount of medicine (for a lower unitary price) is strong evidence that the government was right.