@anomander:
That is one of the problems with drug prices, in effect the US is subsidizing the rest of the world. Some of that is through the research grants for basic research that can lead to new drugs the government does, but the other part is the US unlike almost every other country does not put price limits on drugs, so what happens is drug companies do the famous “cost shifting” that medical providers do, they offset the losses on selling it in other countries by making it more expensive here.
@bunsenburner is correct, it is very easy to talk about greedy big pharma (and small pharma), and that no doubt exists, but there also is a legitimate reason drugs are expensive, it is costly to develop a new drug and then test it, plus for every successful one there are a lot that don’t make it (I don’t remember the ratio, @bunsenburner do you know offhand the failure to success ration? I recall it was easily 5 to 1, if not much larger).
The only way such price controls would work would be for there to be international cooperation, where price levels would be set based on a reasonable rate of return on investment, but I doubt that would happen, if you had hedge funds and other high priced stockholdes involved, they would demand double digit ROI on any drug factoring in the losses for the failures. In theory, along with this agreement, they could also extend the patent length on a drug in return for keeping the cost down to the agreed on ROI (though what we have seen is drug companies pushing for longer patents while keeping the prices the same).
Mylen labs and Shvilli and the like is just a company taking advantage of basically a monopoly situation to jack up the price of something with quite honestly very little cost to them, the cost of developing a new injector pen, for example, is nowhere near a new drug (and that assumes the new injector is anything more than cosmetically different from the old one). Shvilli was even worse, he basically bought a drug company already making the products (no new costs involved), and jacked up the price astronomically, there was no regulatory action involved, no new lines. At least when they restask a drug, they have to go through clinical trials to prove effectiveness, so there is cost, but this?