Comment by candiodari

You do realize this doesn't work, right? Pharma "profit margins are very high", okay, but that means 10% (yes like everywhere there's that one company that does 30% for a while, averages however).

So 100% nationalizing them would change the cost of a $300,000 per year treatment to ... $270,000 per year. Nobody is waiting for that. Frankly even a 30% reduction, the top of the line, would not really matter to people.

The only thing separating medicine and the profit motive will do is stop the development of new drugs. There's no way in hell the government will invest even 10% of what the private sector invests in new drugs. That would be a 10000%+ budget increase for universities. It's not happening. So drug and treatment development will slow to a crawl. So is it better to die because no-one cares to look at you at all than to die because someone doesn't want to pay for your cure?

Apparently it is, according to responses here, but I truly don't understand why.

And if that's what you want to do, let people die, then why not just legislate that you can't buy coverage for diseases with <N cases per year? That would avoid all the inefficiency.