They made $18bn in profit. And the founder is with $6bn.

That’s plenty of credit.

> 70% of drugs advertised on TV are of “low therapeutic value,” study finds

> Ads often tout new, pricey drugs that are not much better than old, cheaper ones.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/most-prescription-dr...

Also:

> The US is one of only two countries that allows direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements, such as TV commercials. (The other is New Zealand.)

The company that makes it is publicly traded so I looked up their financials. The drug is a generic and the patent expired decades ago. Very little is spent on “R&D”. Almost all of their money goes to “advertising”.

"Now a word from our sponsor: Crapitab - ask your doctor for a reason to take it! (Warning: stop taking Crapitab immediately if you experience any of the following symptoms, including but not limited to: insomnia, rash, multiple organ failure, breathing cessation, prolonged unconsciousness, or death.)"

If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and then you try to quadruple the price of what you're producing after you've already sold billions of units at a nice tidy profit, yes, that's greedy.

If pharmaceutical companies were free market entities who took all of the risk of developing new drugs, then it might be justifiable for them to charge whatever the market will bear. But that's not how drug research works in our society; in our society, we already pay for much of the research with our taxes, so pharma companies that are doing parts of the research and producing the drugs are not operating in a free market. They are benefiting from government largesse, and there are limitations that go along with that.

It’s not hypocritical; when your life literally depends on something, and they have a monopoly on the only thing that will save your life, it’s absolutely greedy to try and maximize profits.

When Apple overcharges for an iPhone, there are a few things that make this less evil:

1. There are lots of different smartphones out there that you have the option to buy instead. Even when I worked at Apple I found it surprisingly easy to get by on an Android for my first three months.

2. I don’t die when I don’t have an iPhone.

It’s fine to charge cost plus some nice profit.

But trying to maximise the price in a medical context is morally equivalent to finding a person dying in the desert and making them sign all their assets over to you before giving them water.

What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and services that are working less and less.

I would say that excluding people from accessing life saving drugs, is definitely "greedy", even more so if the company has received a massive influx of cash from the government, like Moderna.

I also want to leave money for the rest of the economy, so that doesn’t really leave room for $5200/year/person for 2 COVID shots. (That’s about 7.5% of GDP just for COVID shots if every American gets 2 such shots per year, which is pretty obviously untenable.)

I want citizens to not die of treatable diseases. Our goals seem to be different.

Successful covid vaccines didn't come from Big Pharma. Moderna and Novartis were not that.

Sure, in an utopian world that would work. But, here on planet Earth, that would massively increase the incentives of fraud. There are already huge issues with this. Increasing the payout by x100 would do more harm than good in this context.