Company hikes price 5,000% for drug that fights complication of AIDS, cancer after purchasing the rights to the drug that has been on the market since 1953

In essence you are claiming that the health care industry, at least direct-to-patient, doesn't care about its customers, only making money.

It clearly doesn't care about the costumer at all if it's going to raise the price of an extremely valuable medication by 5000%.

This can only be true if no person who works in that industry ever cares about customers. Yet that premise is easily demonstrated as false, therefore it is false that direct-to-patient care never cares about its customer

The fact that there are people who care about costumers who work in direct-to-patient health care doesn't say anything about the institution of direct to patient healthcare itself. There can be people who work in single-payer healthcare who also care about the costumers. The bottom line here is that the profit motive provides incentive to bring in the most revenue possible, at as little cost. The results: a 5000% price increase on an extremely important drug. They must really care about costumers. Clearly the cons of the profit motive, at least in this industry, heavily outweighs the pros.

Here's another way the profit motive demonstrates it clearly doesn't always result in care for the costumer:

For every dollar pharmaceutical companies spend on research and development, $19 is spent on promotion and marketing.

If they're filthy rich, that means they can afford to hire people who provide the services that their customers are willing to pay for

This doesn't justify how they became filthy rich in the first place. If there was a king who was filthy rich because his knights raided a bunch of villages for their gold, should we not critique how that gold was earned (and the very existence of a king in the first place, for that matter) because the king is providing jobs to knights? Of course, a healthcare industry making money through extremely high drug prices isn't nearly as criminal as raiding villages, but my point stands: just because the filthy rich provide jobs doesn't justify the means which the filthy rich became rich. Jobs can still be provided minus the high drug prices part.

Beyond just that, the idea that we should celebrate filthy rich industries ripping off the public because they supply jobs through the wealth they accumulate by ripping us off is economic craziness. That's like saying the public should be happy when food prices goes up, because that'll mean food companies will be able to create more jobs. It's just nonsense. What you're doing is taking lots of money from the people who need this food/medication (who come from all economic backgrounds: poor, middle class, working class, etc.), concentrating it into a relatively small amount of people's hands (also known as the filthy rich), and then thanking the filthy rich when they give a smaller portion of that wealth they've accumulated back to the working class through jobs. We can create jobs and provide quality healthcare without ripping the public off.

Alas, I imagine a theological discussion here would be regarded as off-topic, so I'll end my comments here.

I agree that it's not worth getting too deep into the morals here, I don't think it's too unusual to say that the current system is morally corrupt in a countless number of ways.

You may blame the government (patents definitely play a huge role here), and I may blame the profit motive, but really at the end of the day I just believe this system is fundamentally broken, and an alternative is necessary. I personally see a single-payer healthcare system as the best way forward. As long as the profit motive dominates the healthcare industry, I can only imagine that these patents will continue to be handed out, and prices will continue to rise. Please, just any other system for the love of god.

/r/news Thread Parent Link - usatoday.com