Pharmaceutical Companies are Vampires of a Very Strategic Nature

Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to behave unethically in the U.S. due to a failure of the people to act in a consistent way to oppose their greed. Where citizens unite to impose price caps, pharmaceutical companies comply in order to tap into the market. Left to their own devices, a pharmaceutical company tends to register where they get the most benefit, headquarter where they can stash the most profit, manufacture where they get the cheapest labor, sell at the highest prices and raise prices most where they find the most unregulated markets.

The effect is that the United States subsidizes the cost of medicine around the world because we refuse to act as a united citizenry to stop gouging from being allowed and unregulated in our society.

For example, Mylan N.V. makes the EpiPen. They sell it in Canada for a lower price than in America. As much as a third cheaper prices in Canada have been reported. When drug costs are uncapped, medications become for the wealthy and it is not fair for wealthy people to stay healthy and people that have no wealth should die because they cannot afford medication.

The global economy is not an invisible hand. The global economy is a playing field embedded with resources if you are a pharmaceutical company. They play a chess game where they seek to bleed regional resources including labor at the cheapest possible rate. Then, they take the resource out of its environment and position themselves to play the resource on the game board in the market where the greatest return can occur. Governments that do not regulate to protect their people, therefore, become prime targets for market exploitation. As more countries regulate, the pharmaceutical companies find themselves seeking to derive maximum profit out of the few unregulated countries. That is the position the United States finds itself in today.

The people of this country are responsible for managing their resources as well as managing their markets to be in line with the needs of the people. It is not enough just to allow invisible forces to guide the market in a direction that disadvantages the poor when you know that is the result. Other countries have shifted the burden by regulating. Data models now available to every citizen show the disadvantage to the poor that results from our current market dynamic. We can no longer plead ignorance as if that were ever an excuse to ignore the needs of the poor. We have aligned as a country in the past to protect our weakest citizens. I wonder why we do not align again to help our sickest and poorest.