america is so fucking based man
in any proper country that company at least gets forced to pay by the government then ordered to shut down forever due to wanton cruelty. all the employees get generous severance except whoever made that call. depending upon your view of carceral punishment there are a few ways to go with that guy.
Places very tightly control the price drugs can be sold for all over the world. They audit the cost of operation, RD, etc and then adjust the price based on a regulated percentage of profit. This means that drug prices, in the rest of the developed world, are far lower than the US. Even in places with non-socialized healthcare like Switzerland, and Japan. Drug companies are still there, still making money, and not increasing drug prices by 1000% because they want to. Then there is the humanitarian practice of subsidizing the cost to patient for exceptionally expensive treatments. For example, the alternative treatment to this drug is more than twice the cost of the drug, it is also less effective, leaving a lot of long term costs. So EU countries, for example, subsidize this drug because it actually ends up saving the tax payers money to do so. This makes it available to the ~1/10000 citizens with the condition, spinal muscular atrophy.
In the US this will likely bankrupt these people, leaving the costs for them and the taxpayer. This ends in a total loss of economic productivity higher than the government just footing the cost for the drug in the first place. The US system is lose/lose. Both the patients and the government pays more than anywhere else. The only people winning here are corporate executives and their shareholders.
That’s why I prefaced the whole thing with (more or less)“capitalism aside”: Everything you said also applies to drugs which are still overpriced, but definitely cheaper in the US. The reason this kind of drug is especially expensive, also in places not as fucked as the US, is that it’s a) a one-dose cure and b) for a rare disease. If it were a monthly injection instead of a one-time one it’d still be as expensive but not per dose but per patient-lifetime, and if twice as many had spinal muscular atrophy it’d be roughly half as expensive.
The bargaining EU insurers do with drug manufacturers takes that into account because, as said, otherwise there’d simply be no drugs for those rare diseases.
Overall I think it’d be better for insurers to fund drug research more directly but also then researching cures for rare illnesses would cost a lot of money per manufactured dose.