america is so fucking based man
in any proper country that company at least gets forced to pay by the government then ordered to shut down forever due to wanton cruelty. all the employees get generous severance except whoever made that call. depending upon your view of carceral punishment there are a few ways to go with that guy.
That’s why I prefaced the whole thing with (more or less)“capitalism aside”: Everything you said also applies to drugs which are still overpriced, but definitely cheaper in the US. The reason this kind of drug is especially expensive, also in places not as fucked as the US, is that it’s a) a one-dose cure and b) for a rare disease. If it were a monthly injection instead of a one-time one it’d still be as expensive but not per dose but per patient-lifetime, and if twice as many had spinal muscular atrophy it’d be roughly half as expensive.
The bargaining EU insurers do with drug manufacturers takes that into account because, as said, otherwise there’d simply be no drugs for those rare diseases.
Overall I think it’d be better for insurers to fund drug research more directly but also then researching cures for rare illnesses would cost a lot of money per manufactured dose.
I think you missed the point of the second part of my statement. That the government pays for expensive treatments because, in the long run, it actually costs less for them to do so, than to hold the patient liable. This means the cost to patient will never be 2.1 million dollars, which accomplishes the goal of drugs not costing that much where it matters.
The only prescription drugs that are cheaper in the US are off brand generics. This is the case because other options are 3-4 times more expensive, on average, than in the EU, so the increased demand for generics creates a manufacturing scale that drops the prices per unit. This price decrease is 20-30% on average. People in the EU are fine with brand names because they aren’t drastically more expensive than generics, even at US generic prices. The end of the day though, they pay less for drugs, as whole, than we do, and no patient is paying 2.1 million dollars for a drug.