Call it the "We actually care about human life price control" or something. They can use it as marketing ammo as well. Proving they actually care is good for business.
See how this works?
When you have a disease that might cripple or kill you you bet you are willing to bankrupt yourself to cure it. The regulations are absolutely necessary. Currently companies are utilizing this and charge significant amount of money for a cure. On top of that they prefer medication that doesn't treat the sickness and instead just keeps it under control, because that way they make more money.
It is easy to sympathize with pharmaceutical companies unless you have to get one of those diseases.
From the article:
There’s a drug called Sovaldi that works astonishingly well to cure people with the liver disease Hepatitis C. The rub? It costs $1,000 per day for all 12 weeks of treatment.
12 x 7 x $1,000 = $84,000
I saw the bill for my family member's liver transplant. The total cost for the transplant was over $500,000 and that doesn't include the pre-transplant and post-transplant treatments and hospitalizations. At $84,000 for a cure, Sovaldi is an absolute bargain.
Of course, not everybody has $84,000. That's why we have insurance. Unfortunately, the payers in this article, state Medicaid programs, are in many cases heading down a path to insolvency. That's the bigger issue.
In private insurance markets, most drug makers provide significant discounts to incentivize payers. These discounts often amount to 50% or more. So you can't address the issue of access to treatment without acknowledging that insurers, not drug makers, ultimately decide which patients have access.
Gilead has a program that provides Sovaldi free of charge to patients who are uninsured or have been denied treatment. For those who cannot obtain Sovaldi, there are a variety of other Hepatitis C treatments available, so it is unlikely that somebody with a need will go untreated, even if their payer won't give them access to the treatment they prefer or which may be most effective.
This is a much more complicated issue than the article here suggests, and it's easier to find a scapegoat than to honestly address the complexities of this market.