Comment by miki123211

Drugs cost what they cost because of R&D, not manufacturing.

Look at how cheap generics are, that's what it costs to actually make and distribute a drug.

The pharma business model is that you spend incredible amounts of money on doing research, identifying promising drugs, doing trials, and overcoming all the regulatory hurdles you need to overcome to get the drugs to market. You then get a 20-year[1] exclusivity deal on your newly-introduced drug through patents, which you use to recoup your costs.

You don't just recoup the costs of inventing this particular drug, but also all the other drugs that seemed promising, had all that money spend on trials, but ended up just a bit too ineffective to ever be sold.

We could abolish the patent system and genericize everything, and that would instantly bring drug prices down massively, but then we wouldn't ever see any new drugs being researched.