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Comment by cvsh | Hacker News Reader

The median monthly household income in the U.S. is $4710.

The difference is two orders of magnitude.

Correct, if you were to go purely by the wages, the pill should cost $4 in the US not $400. It is still high, I was just pointing out that there are market differences. And to expand on that, the illness the drug in question is more common in Tanzania (per the article) so I can only presume the drug company can sell an order of magnitude more and might actually be making almost as much profit in aggregate on that $0.04 as they do the $400 here.

The article explains why it's so expensive:

> Why are prices so different in the U.S.?

> "In other countries, there are price control methods. The government steps in to ensure drug prices do not increase by a certain amount," Alpern says. "There are no price control mechanisms in the U.S."

> Between 2011 and 2016, mebendazole's price jumped more than 8,000 percent, from $4.50 to $369.

So it was indeed $4.5 in the U.S. - until the company decided to get greedy.

I'm not sure your conclusion follows from the article. The lack of controls may contribute but the reasoning may have not been greed. There are many market factors in play. It may very well be greed but I don't see much evidence in this article either way.

In other words, the article explains why the price growth was not capped. It does not explain why it grew in the first place.

In general I wish the drug company had taken time to contribute to this article and show their side of the story.

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