[dodobirdlord]

The lie people tell themselves is that because India does it, everyone could do it without disrupting the rate at which new drugs are researched and brought to market.

As I’ve discussed in other comments, this is why pharma companies have to recover their entire investment off of sales in the first world. The rest of the world is never going to buy their drugs at a price that would make the R&D spending worthwhile. This is why companies sell their drugs for much cheaper in countries where incomes are much lower, and also why drugs produced and sold cheaply in other countries generally can’t be legally imported into the United States. It’s also why claims that drug prices could be lowered in the United States by importing them from countries where they are sold more cheaply are fundamentally ridiculous. The reason drug prices are high in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe is that they are subsidizing the rest of the world by doing substantially the entirety of pharmaceutical R&D spending in the world.

[inter_netuser]

"Peter Bach, a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and his colleagues compared prices of the top 20 best-selling drugs in the United States to the prices in Europe and Canada. They found that the cumulative revenue from the price difference on just these 20 drugs more than covers all the drug research and development costs conducted by the 15 drug companies that make those drugs—and then some"

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170307.05903...

"To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion."

Seems there is a room for another India at least.