Healthline.com: Should Multiple Sclerosis Drugs Cost $62,000 a Year?

[passiveporcupine]

72. Why do you need to control it?

Why should you make an obscene profit off of a medication necessary to keep people alive and functioning? Then if they can't afford it, they suffer or die? Medicine is not like a car or stereo. When people are sick, they need the medicine that keeps them alive, it's not just that they want it. If they need it, they will pay whatever you charge, or go without and pay the consequences. You can live without a car or stereo or ipad.

We need to socialize every aspect of health care. We still need to pay for the doctors, surgeons, specialists and inventors, because they work hard and go to school to get the education necessary to do the job, so they deserve decent pay. But they don't need to make huge profit on new discoveries, or on doing their job. They should have gotten into the profession for altruistic reasons. Helping people should be as important to them as living well.

Why not just get paid a good wage for inventing it? If they are good, and enough people buy them, you will still make plenty of money, even at a reasonable cost (a competitive cost with other drug manufacturers). If they are good but only help a small group of people who have a rare disease, you would either have to charge a million a pill or not develop them at all? Is that the way we want medicine to work?