except when the choice is "Buy this or die", people tend to pay whatever they have to.
Poor people end up taking that increase in life expectancy and just wasting it on walking and sitting on the bus because it's so expensive to operate a vehicle here in Canada.
It's your mother's place to tell you to wear your seatbelt, not the government's.
In this case, not even due to a patent, but because you can't sell a generic without lengthy, costly FDA approval.
Essentially the government is telling sick people, "you can't take this generic daraprim from India because we haven't approved it, so pay Martin Shkreli $750 a pill or fuck off and die".
It's asinine and it's 100% the government's fault this is happening. If Martin Shkreli hadn't done it, someone else would have.
Drugs are not comparable, because there's typically only a handful of drugs that are effective for a given condition, and often just one.
The inexpensive prices for drugs cited in the article happened before the US government got heavily involved with running the health care industry. Maybe that's a coincidence, but I doubt it.
The end of famine in America happened around 1800, as the free market and the industrial revolution fixed that problem. Famine persists in other areas that insist on collectivized farms or have other problems that prevent free market agriculture, such as warfare.
Even the Soviet Union had to import wheat from Kansas, and allowed farmers to farm their own plots and sell the results, because the collectivized farms could not produce enough.