Is it right? Nope. It is what makes the shareholders billions of dollars? Yep.
When you look at cost per life saved, pharmaceuticals are a bargain compared to hospitals or other parts of our medical system (esp. in the US).
I guess it’s like climate change. We can’t beat our neighbors by solving it so who cares, but these feel like things our species is really gonna have to start solving. But maybe we won’t and we will just make life unnecessarily hard for most human beings, when we could be stopping climate change and eradicating AIDS.
Usually the way it works is there is some wildly high sticker price for individual Americans, which is what that $40K probably is here, and almost everyone pays less than that. E.g. American insurance companies pay something that's still very high but lower than that. Europeans pay something lower than the American insurance companies. And lower income countries get the cheapest price of all.
The article does refer to this btw, Gilead is already talking about some voluntary licensing program that'll be available so somebody can manufacture cheap generics in countries like Uganda. This is quite common with this sort of drug but people generally don't read past the headline.
What's going on is simply that the pharmas have American regulators in their pockets so they can charge anything they want in the US.
Systems don’t have to treat people for AIDs. People get less sick so they can work more and pay more taxes. Parents are around to raise their children, leading to better outcomes for everyone.
Also, we can subsidize R&D (or subsidize it more).
Focusing on profit only leads to human suffering.