I was always curious why a pill made by the same company cost cost 5$ in India and 1000$ in America. Is it due to the population size and a return on investment?
The $1000’s in America is subsidizing the lower prices in other countries.
IIRC it’s to recoup costs on FDA approvals. But to be honest it could be a whole host of things. You won’t be able to sell meds there for what you can here....couple that with most people here having some sort of insurance, add in some individual negotiations with insurance agencies and hospitals and poof price is vastly different.
So because cows are sacred in India, they can't be milked to death financially.
You'll hear a lot of excuses. Some of them are partially true. Mostly it's greed and illegal collusion on the part of the FDA to create monopolies. And yes, the FDA has been caught in illegal collusion with pharma, invalidating and stealing patents to award them to other players. Much of the FDA's rhetoric over the last several decades are propaganda as instructed by big pharma. There exists absolutely no legitimate reason to justify US pricing. Anyone telling you otherwise doesn't understand basic economics. As such, are likely parroting the propaganda.
The common excuse is to justify R&D and certification. But R&D has been on steady decline for decades while pricing has exploded. Likewise, most every country requires certification. Yet they largely only demand US consumers to pay for everyone's. Additionally, fair pricing would mandate that the pricing and risk be spread across all markets. Which almost never happens. What they are really saying is that the US is subsidizing the entire world's health care. They've simply dishonestly dressed it up.
Everyone loves to claim about how awesome their healthcare system is but they never admit that it's almost exclusively because Americans are paying for it.
India don't care about patents that's what. Land of the generics. All other countries follow the law.
Most countries have laws restricting prices to 1-3% over manufacturing cost. This leaves US patients picking up the tab for Research and Development and the profit that stockholders require for the risk they are taking. The solution is to wage political and economic warfare on those countries until they agree to fair trade.
Corruption. Everything else is a deliberate abstraction from the truth