There's not a single drug company on the market that stops charging a high price for a drug as soon its covered its research expenditure.
Not saying that it's not a screwed up industry, but stories like these distort the problem as well
If we split the profits across all of the people that "deserve reimbursement" you usually end up with a few dollars per person. Definitely, not enough to make a meaningful impact.
Additionally, the American consumer subsidizes R&D and costs for the rest of the world. America routinely pays 5x-20x more for drugs than other countries and American grants account for >50% of worldwide medical research funding (caveat: the last time I checked). Yup, even Europe is a fraction of what America pays.
I would encourage you to actually do the math and decide for yourself rather than taking (or anyone else's) word for it.
A much more interesting discussion could be had around who pays for it (and how, and how the prices come to be as high etc.) – because somebody ultimately does.
But I hope you agree that in all of these models, the doctor does in the end get paid, i.e. accepts payment? I never said that the patient should be the one paying them directly. But if nobody does, there will be no doctor.
One of the arguments against this is inflation from creating money out of thin air to fund it. Its a lie. The service is required and you don't get inflation from paying folks a wage to do a job. You do get it by propping up profits of private companies which essentually through the fattening of their bank accounts devalues money. Remember if you have a large number of folks competing for a good or service and they are all on similar playing fields (e.g wages near market avg), competition is high, the value of each dollar earned remains high.
If you have a handful of companies with buying power that far outweighs that of others allowing them to capture more than their share of a service or good because they can literally just throw more money at it than the majority of us can. This drives Inflation. It devalues money creating a new norm of your dollars being worth less.
Tldr: The benefit from entirely gov funded healthcare far outweighs that of a privatized system.
Of course I agree this market should be regulated - like we regulate it in Europe - but at the end some company is investing into drug research in order to make a profit.
Profit enough to survive. But don't take more than your worth. Tbh profiting off medicine is about as low as profiting off weapons manufacturing. You literally make money out of the misery of others.
Thank f#@k I live in a country that has free healthcare. The concept of privatizing the health of your citizens and letting a select few profit from that is absolutely batshit insane.