You can't use the 0.1% cases to justify the 90% who will get wrecked financially because of major surgery, cancer treatment, etc because it's so expensive. Medical treatment shouldn't be a for profit business, there has to be a better way, and other countries have a better system (in the sense of doing the greatest good for the most people, and not just the 0.1%) than we do and we can copy the best of them as we will be doing it from scratch.
I think it can be for profit but it needs regulation on how much you can bleed patients for. Selling pills for thousands of dollars when they cost you a dime to make is simply exploitative.
What was the NRE on that pill or the hundreds (thousands?) that didn't work at all?
OTOH (or the other other hand), I'll bet that you could make a strong argument for stopping new drug development entirely. Simply sell existing drugs for as little as possible. It wouldn't surprise me if most of that research has insanely high marginal cost with little benefit at this point.
I'll bet you'd have a healthier public, on average, if this happened.
The cost of medication is not strongly correlated to research costs. In the US most drug prices are set via a single factor: how much will people pay for it?
Under this rubric, "cheap" lifesaving drugs are viewed as an arbitrage opportunity. If a lifesaving cancer drug costs $20k per month, then why should a comparable MS treatment be "given away" at $15 per pill?
Also a huge percentage of new drug research is not geared toward creating new and interesting treatments: it's based on making small changes to existing molecules to preserve efficacy while making something "new" enough to be patentable.
