I work in biotech/pharma, and not all of us are greedy sacks of shit as some people seem to think. I'm not an exec and cant speak to their ethics broadly, but like any industry where people make big bucks you have greedy asshole-y people here too. But coming back to regulation, the FDA's primary mandate is the safety of the populace, its not to create economic incentives or disincentives. The FDA has been slowly increasing the standard required for compliance, which in turn raises the operational cost to ensure safety/efficacy/reliability/etc (obviously a very good thing IMO) but that in turn has also increased both the incidence and the cost of failure. When one product that sucked up a cool 10-50M of capital fails, the company has to recoup the cost elsewhere. Of course nobody wants to take a haircut themselves, so they just bump up the prices. I think a lot of this has to do with the ways companies in general pretty much have to absorb market risk to give a false sense of stability to their workforce. Maybe if our corporate system were structured where it was OK to fail, people might be less inclined to mask the failure on the balance sheet to please Wall Street.

>Alternatively, have a purely nationalized "company" that's funded by taxpayers and "sells" generics at cost. I think the value to society of cheap, readily available generics make this worth it even if it's not something that could survive in the market.

Well, maybe.. I'll keep an open mind but when has the government done anything cheaply or efficiently? They will have to sub-contract at-least some parts of it out just like they do with weapons or infrastructure or other projects. Government contractors are going to milk the system with their '$100 screwdriver' invoices.