Drug Executive: It's a moral requirement to charge patients the highest price

[Anomalocaris]

I don't know that it's a moral imperative, but it is a business imperative to maximize profits for the benefit of stockholders and that is a moral and legal imperative.  I understand we don't want profit to drive the decisions of pharmaceutical companies, but there don't immediately appear particularly good alternatives that I know of.  Consumers can put some pressure on manufacturers, but since they have a captive market, that's ineffective.  It could be mandated by law and regulated, but that might chill the motivation for spending the money to research and develop new drugs, and that's a lot.  There doesn't seem to be an obvious solution, or, at the least, I haven't heard of one.

The alternative is to mandate that pharmaceutical firms make make certain specified R&D investments and make certain product available at certain price levels as a condition for the pharmaceutical firm to operate and be able to enrich its shareholders.

Greed is a powerful driver than can be channeled to provide for greater public good.  But Operative work is “channeled”.

How much is the financial damage to society resulting from reduction in the numbers of people vaccinated?

To optimize the value of the medical establishment, the advantage of greater investment in medical R&D must be balanced against:

1. the aggregate effect of reduction in accessibility of the fruits of past R&D.

2. the creation of harmful perverse incentives for selectively focusing on those R&D that promises to maximize the revenue to the pharmaceutical industry rather than to minimize the aggregate cost to society of ill health.

Okay.  And how do we get there?  I don't think asking pharmaceutical companies to just give away their labors like Salk did is any kind of answer.  As noted in my last post, lack of profit can equally as well dry up access.

False dichotomy.  The alternatives not only “untrammeled maximization of profits” and “lack of profits”. See above.