Great article... Pharmaceuticals is interesting since the needs of corporations functioning under capitalism and their customers disconnect a lot
Making effective drugs is mad expensive (billions of USD), so companies are strongly incentivized to squeeze as much profit as possible everywhere on top of the already bad enough corporate greed levels
Thanks to patents, new drugs are almost always monopolies, so the pharma who makes the drug can charge (almost) as much as they want and make a lot
Whereas making drugs without patents is not profitable as the article suggested... so these are done mostly by factories based in India and other not fully developed countries
Funnily enough most ppl need cheaper generic drugs, not the ones most pharma companies are innovating and will make mad profits from
And for the people mentioned above, pharmaceuticals are basically a need not a luxury, but somehow it's dependent on the ebbs and flows of free market capitalism
My unhinged opinion is... Most of the pharmaceuticals research are done by (mostly) publicly-funded research labs anyways... so might as well just let the government do something about this? I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in academia wouldn't mind moonlighting as CEO at a nonprofit drug manufacturer or sth