The Proposition

Now that kind of reply just begs to be torn apart. First of all, out of its $50 bln. annual revenue Pfizer spends only $7 bln on r&d (how most of it is wasted, read below) and receives $8 bln. in net profit. Other pharmaceutical companies making huge net profits off of overpriced drugs are:
- J&J – $13 bln.
- Wyeth (now part of Pfizer) – $4,6 bln.
- Amgen – $3,2 bln.
- Abbott – $5 bln.
- Novartis – $8,2 bln.
- GSK – $13,6 bln.
- Sanofi – $5,6 bln.
- AZ – $6.2 bln.
and many more.;
This is after all taxations, expenses and reinvestment costs are taken into account. Now, a microscopic part of total revenue goes into R&D and even most of R&D money isn’t spent on innovative drugs, but rather on overlapping or useless drugs that end up being dangerous because the company had to come up with some new product for the shopping season. All of this at the expense of taxpayers and sick people worldwide of course.

This means that you don’t need a magic fairy to replace Pfizer and all its “competitors”, you need to remove their monopoly-sustaining patents, either regulate, nationalize them or invest money into non-corporate R&D (not nearly as much though, because most of R&D money is wasted on overlapping and dangerous products, which is also why it’s so hard to get them all approved), and sell the medicine at low prices. This, along with regulating the price of hospital care and physician services will shave off at least half of the cost of health care:

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One not so funny example of this patent extortion is Thailand, which has a lot of HIV-infected people so it had to buy overpriced patented US drugs for $600-700 per person per month. Then it decided to replicate the drug in a national laboratory and costs went down to about $30 per person per month, which was a giant relief on the budget. But the US couldn’t stand for it, so it put Thailand on the list of copyright violators. If Hypocrates was alive, he’d wish he was dead.

Also, because of these patents, competing companies are obliged to waste money on spawning tons of overlapping and useless products. In fact, if some company discovers the cure for cancer, it will be able to withhold it and charge an insane amount of money for it – it will own the patent and all people, governments and HMOs will have to waste money, patients will continue to die while one entity gets rich. That’s basically how the industry works now, in your wonderful Capitalist system, which is why prices have never gone down and the cost of health care in the US has only gone up.