No, but capitalists follow the incentives. The surprising thing is that, although nobody likes this, there isn't yet some tax or something to make selfish capitalists avoid doing it.
But capital is also political power. The capitalists interact with the system that structures their markets, their property rights, their contract law, their regulations, their hierarchies etc. The system itself is a strange loop which ultimately leads to contradictions. A capitalist acting in their rational self interest modifies the system in order to improve it for their own ends. This inevitably means deviations from the neoclassical ideal.
If there's one useful idea from the marxists, it's that the dominant modes of economic activity of the day determine the structures of our institutions, not the other way around. It may not be completely true, but the way capital dominates all other forms of power in the world is fundamentally troublesome. Capitalism eats itself, and every crisis requires a lot of bloodshed and suffering from the unpropertied in order to keep the system going forward.
A change to intellectual property laws could also fix the problem. The government could allow others to sell the drug but give a percentage of their revenue to the rights holder.
The drug isn't patented anymore. Apparently the issue is that you need to conduct trials if you want to have permission to make a copy of the drug and to do so you need a supply to compare your new copy with and that was hard to purchase.
I'm surprised about the drug trial bit. I thought generics didn't need to have new trials .. they just need to have the exact same formulation. The oddness is that they need to "reverse engineer" the formulation themselves. The pill's color, shape and markings couldn't be copied though.
Can anyone knowledgeable on this critique what I wrote? I got my info during a tour of a generic drug manufacturer's plant a looooong time ago.
I believe the generic maker must show bioequivalency to make sure the thing they are making works the same as the thing the other manufacturer was making. There's probably numerous ways that making a complicated medicine can be screwed up.
