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by missedthecue 952 days ago
So the median pharma industry profit margin is 13.8%. Forget lowering it to fortune 500 average... take it zero. How much lower do drug costs get? Not much. This pill is still going to cost many thousands of dollars.
1 comments

Any solution will require targeting multiple sources of cost. As you point out elsewhere, R&D is a big cost driver, but profit seems comparable [1]. Moreover one does have to wonder about the various sources of that R&D cost, I'm not an expert but it would seem to me that issues like "evergreening" would inflate development costs unnecessarily.

[1] https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/evidence-base/how-did-the-publi...