> If it works, people often _need_ it to prolong their life or improve their health. What drug companies are selling... isn’t like what other companies are selling.

It is very much like many other products. If you don't have food you will die of starvation, if you don't have shelter you will die of exposure, etc.

The real issue is drug patents. Nobody is complaining about the price of ibuprofen any more than they complain about the price of eggs. But the patent system is doing what it's supposed to here -- twenty years ago any patented drug didn't exist, and it nominally only exists now because the inventors judged it to be sufficiently profitable to conduct the research. If you make it less profitable, you'll get less research.

There is no drug research fairy. If you don't want the money to come from high insurance premiums that pay for high drug costs, it has to come from somewhere else. And just devising some other method (like taxes) of extracting the same money from the same general public isn't really going to change much.