Economists view this as a good and obvious way to get medication to more people.
I'm glad that we're able to subsidize drug prices to make it so Africans can get cheaper healthcare, and I am fine with charging the insurance companies lots of money and taking money from richer people in the process (since the high costs have to be rolled into the premium rates), but it's a little frustrating that it has to come at the direct expense of poorer Americans in the process.
Looking in from the outside this whole reasoning seems to me like some kind of propaganda thats meant to me easily swallowed by americans.
It seems like a deflection that sells the disparity by leveraging american exceptionalism (US medicine is the best) to be swallowed resulting in variying thoughts depending on the disposition of the recipient ranging between "i am glad we are helping those poor people" to "WAAAA why should I pay for them".
But neither of it is really true. The truth as it looks from the outside is that the american people are simply taken for a ride by pretty much all the parts of the healthcare sector.
The military industrial complex of course has its own share of many problems, but clearly having the price be reasonable for the average Americans is not one of them.
It was written before those drugs actually were made available to poorer countries for low cost for humanitarian reasons.
The tech industry does it all the time too, pricing games and SaaS subscriptions based on the currency, so that i.e. people in Russia or India pay a cheaper rate. Not because their consumers are being subsidized but because they would get zero profit from them otherwise.
Many countries that are comparitively rich should see similar high prices. This is not the case. Also when looking at the develpment costs of some of the most expensive drugs the high prices are simply not justified.
Especially in cases where the main costs for a manufacturer is marketing because development was fully or partially financed from public money.
I mean aside from insulin the epipen price hikes are also well known about. As manufacturing technics improve and whatever cost overheads are payed off the prices should go down for all drugs. This is not the case at all somehow.
But it wouldn't be necessary to leave all else equal, if we introduced the same kind of price controls. The idea I think seems interesting is to do more research funding via large public prizes, rather than primarily grants and profits. Unfortunately it sounds pretty untenable, politically, to me, to set these prizes high enough to encourage a similar amount of research as the profit motive does. It's hard for me to envision a like $3B prize for "create a really good weight loss drug" having been politically feasible, for instance.
Lets just think about your 3B weighloss thing leaving out complications like its a spherical cow in a vaccum - there are enough overweight people in the world that if you can sell enough of it to each of them at a 10USD profit in total you easily make that back. Imagine what a 20usd per cured overweight person profit would do. isn't doubling your money enough? And considering that new potentially overweight people are born every day it would be a perpetual (spherical) cash cow.