| I suspect there was research conducted by public universities to create this pill, IE that it was publically funded. The ethics of "I researched this I made this it's mine so you pay what I demand" is one thing. The ethics of collective research, where part or all of the actual labour is conducted by individuals who are working on the public dollar, or while studying (grad students are infamously used for most of the labour in university research), or have no residual income from the results of the research, or a mixture of the above. If university students did most of the work, is this company then justified for asking this price? We don't know whether any of this is the case. In our discussion, without additional research, our only metric should be "what are the manufacturing and distribution costs". The public health is the concern, first and foremost. If, for example, an illness reaches epidemic proportions, it's entirely reasonable for a government to step in and say "it is more important that citizens NOT DIE than that your company makes a profit". Hepatitis C is not at that stage anywhere in the US to my knowledge. I suspect that this drug just happens to be the straw that broke the lawmakers' back; they're arbitrarily choosing to make this particular drug the battleground for stopping a negative larger. |