Ill put my cards on the table. I originally worked in biopharmaceutical manufacturing for 5 years, one of those years as a supervisor and helped bring 2 drugs to the market. I then got bored of all the regulation and became an RN, which I have been practicing for 6 yesrs, 2 of which in a supervisory position. So I can tell if people are bulshitting about this industry, and 99% of captialist arguments I've seen are complete bullshit.

I hear capitalists blame excessive US regulation for drug prices and attribute other countries lower drug prices to less red tape. No, just no, that's not how any of this works.

We did have a much more streamlined process, but then drug like Fen-Phen and Vioxx got approved even though they killed a bunch of people. So now just getting a drug approved for the market is a $1 billion, 10 year long process (as of 2012, when I was still in the industry). Do you think that every country does this process all independently? If you do, you ate stupid enough to be a Neoliberal or Ancap.

The way it actually works is that regulatory agencies from all over the world copy eathother's homework and specialize in parts of the approval process. When my company's drugs were getting the manufactiring processrs approved, the USA's FDA set up shop in a conference room and poured over every line of our SOPs and documentiaon, with just one brief tour of the manufacturing floor. The European Medicines Agency covered every square inch of the manufacturing floor and made sure to observe every step of our process being done, but didn't bother with any documentation outside of the SOP currently being performed. The Brazilian agency did the same for our auxilarry facilities. And so on.

See a pattern? Everyone copies eachothers homework because doing the same thing over again is expensive, slow, and wasteful. Some countries have different laws about medicines and the finer points of approval, but the bulk of the work is done on a global scale. So now you know that anyone saying medicines are so expensive in the USA because of regulations is a fucking idiot and should be ignored.

The reason why drugs in the USA are more expensive is that the governments of all the other nations are the sole negotiator against the pharmaceutal and medical device companies, so they get a good deal because thet are the only buyer. The USA govemrent does not negotiate prices, so the drug and medical device companies are able to extort their buyers because they have a monopoly or cartel on selling the products. Anybody blaming it on regulation is just pulling excuses out of their ass to cover up their ideologie's clear contradiction.

Edit: You must also be stupid enough to be a neoliberal or ancap if you think a company is going to spend billions of dollars to bring a product to the market but can't get a patent for it.

Another edit: Capitalists seem to be under the impression that pharmaceutical companies are paying most of the $1 billion cost to bring a drug to market to the FDA. Right now it costs about $3 million for the FDA approval process, about $50-100 million for the clinical trials. Most of the money is spent acquiring the patent for drugs to fill their pipeline, as well as many times more patents for drugs that will fail and not cost a dime. The actual drug discovery is done by small to mod size companies you never heard of.

Yet another edit: A lot of capitalists think that the $1 billion is going to bureaucrats in the FDA. In reality the FDA charges the drug company about $3 million for the whole process. The drug companies spend about $50-100 million in phase 1-3 of drug trials. Most of the money goes towards buying small and midsize drug development companies that actually discover the drugs. Very few drugs in the last few decades have been discovered by the big pharma company that brought them to the market.