As long as we're talking about what ought to be: Should the model we have be incentivizing the recoupment of investments using the threatpoint of death to extract maximum resources from choiceless "customers"?

However we do it, the answer to "how much will it cost?" when it comes to medicine needs to stop being "how much do you have?"

Maybe India could fund its own NHS instead of nuclear weapons and space missions?

India is a country that likes to play poor when there's some advantage to be had, but it's a facade.

Nuclear weapons are arguably necessary with a nuclear armed neighbor they've regularly been at war with, and the space missions have the potential to make profits for India.

The US funds space missions with folks dying for want of medical care, but people don't tend to complain about that.

I'm not sure funding their NHS is going to do all that much good when the drug costs multiple times the per-capita income of Indians.

This is misleading; if the gains you obtain by having a nuclear and space program in the long term are greater than not having them and investing somewhere else, then the rational choice is to have them even if you're poor.

I agree that recoupment of investment is not a right, and as such laws are not here to help with that.

I think there's a key difference between the threat of death from a disease vs. say the threat of death at a robber's hand. Do you agree? If not, is it immoral/extortion whenever someone is charged money for a necessity?

The difference becomes some what less when the moral entity in question says to the dying in want of that necessity "I could charge you less for this and still survive myself, but I won't", and especially more so when they use government regulatory capture to make sure that no one else is allowed to either.

"Survive" and "innovate" aren't the same thing; if pharmaceutical corporations did what you suggest here they should, we'd just be hearing about how evil it is that they don't develop new drugs any more because of all those evil profiteering CEOs.

It's just my socialist Utopianism showing. I'm saying that I hope that there's an alternative path to innovation that isn't innovation by the rich for the rich only. It's probably working about as well as can be expected under the current parameters, but damn it has some ugly warts now and again.

I'm just an armchair historiographer, but it seems to me that more or less all innovation is "by the rich for the rich only" -- at first. Pharmaceutical research, in its modern form, is a very young field; give it fifty years to grow up and figure out what the hell it's doing, and things may well look a lot more equitable.

No merchant would, by that standard, be able to charge any premium once their survival is ensured. Is that what you're suggesting?

Even if it's true, it's an absolutely boneheaded thing for a CEO to actually say.

They absolutely should be compensated - they always had the option of licensing it in India, or simply pricing it appropriately and benefit/reaching a much much larger market and make it up on volume. They decided to do neither.

If the article is accurate, he doesn't want to sell in that market. I'd struggle to justify not letting somebody else do that for this sort of product when they have a law like this.

He doesn’t want to sell in that market at the price that the government would fix. If they can charge the same price than in USA then he will be happy to do business there.