Someone should investigate how it came to be that anesthetizing COVID-19 patients and sticking a tube into their lungs was the standard treatment, until the front-line medical teams rebelled. [1]
[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Ventilators-aren-t-a-pan...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventil...
If I promise to buy a car from you for $100,000, and you spend $10,000 to make it, and I discover I don't need the car anymore, in most cases, I can walk away paying you $10,000. If you continued doing unneeded work, that'd be bad economics. If you could rake me over the coals and ask to me to pay $50k, that'd be exploitative. In most cases, the outcome of a broken contract is that I try to set things right for you by either:
* Paying you costs incurred
* Paying you expected profits
* Or similar.
Courts calculate damages by a range of formulas, which then sets standards for how business is conducted, and in most cases, people don't go to court but just agree to pay damages.
This is foreign to how most people think about agreements; it's a very different culture. But if you talk to lawyers or executives, that's how they reason about contracts.
In the case with Phillips, they already delivered 1/4th of the ventilators, there are reports all over the place stating that these were overpaid for. Of course the government overpaid for these. They were in a situation were they had to. Phillips even made indications in their earnings reports that these are contributing significant profit.
These manufacturers would not hesitate to enter one of these contracts again in the future.