Here’s the rub with developing something as important as a medicine. If it works, people often _need_ it to prolong their life or improve their health. What drug companies are selling... isn’t like what other companies are selling. We ought not look at it through our normal understanding of goods in a free market. Take, for example, Sovaldi, a drug which cures Hepatits C. After discovering this drug and confirming it…
This is the biggest flaw in how we think about many important issues. Market economics isn’t something you decide to apply or not based on public policy. Instead, its the framework of actions and consequences against which you must determine public policy. If your policy is to have private companies develop and commercialize medicines, then you need to ensure functioning markets from drugs. That means avoiding antitrust issues, but also avoiding free-rider problems that result for drugs being easy to copy.
You can, of course, do something else, such as having the government pay to commercialize drugs. What you can’t do is eat your cake and have it too, by deciding that you can somehow “opt out” of market dynamics for industries you deem to be of public importance. It’s like saying that “supersonic flight is important, so we ought not to look at it through our normal understanding of aerodynamics.”