[a_puppy]

Novo Nordisk won the lottery by developing Ozempic, an extraordinarily successful drug. (See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/business/denmark-ozempic-...) If you cherry-pick the most successful pharma companies, of course they're going to look unreasonably profitable. For a fair comparison, you need to look at the global pharma industry as a whole.

To start the discussion, I found this analysis of global pharma industry profitability: https://www.ispor.org/docs/default-source/euro2023/poster-is... Note that only 55% of the pharma companies even made a profit; the other 45% lost money. And the average profit margin was around 20%. So even if pharma companies voluntarily relinquished all profits, drugs would only be 20% cheaper!

The fundamental issue is that drug development is simply expensive. When people get angry about pharma profits, they're barking up the wrong tree.