If you want to operate as a pharmaceutical producer / seller in this country, you have to supply this list of emergency medicines at 10% above the price we can import from China / India.”
And be done with it.
Edit: fixed a typo
I worry that requiring a pharma company to provide supplies hurts anyone who wants to start up a new pharma company. It's easier to comply with government regulations once you're a big company and have many plants, but new companies have to be lean or else they'll never make it off the ground.
No amount of well-that-isn't-going-to-work thinking is going to help.
Try something, if that doesn't work try something else.
I believe the fashionable word is iterate.
Like, for example, the decision to increase the price of an Epipen to US$300 in the USA, whereas the same product in Australia costs AU$100
> Society isn't some laboratory where you can run experiments to your heart's delight.
In a way that's what policy and regulation are. Since we can't know the full consequences of policy and regulation until they're implemented and time passes. Sure, most policy and regulation aren't willy-nilly.
Trade-offs I guess. Regulate the sale of some emergency medicines so that those who need them now can afford them at the expense of, what exactly? It's not like regulating the sale of one medicine is going to break a pharmaceutical company?
Why do I feel like I'm trying to defend sensible pricing here? Are people really that allergic to the word regulation?
Why not both? I'm serious. It seems like a good idea to promote competition and put a ceiling on the prices of essential medicines based on the global market. 10% above the lowest price may be a bit aggressive, but something must be done to stop these 10,000% markups we're seeing now.
Of course, they still complain and somehow shoehorn busdev & marketing costs into the R&D bucket anyway.