💊 Medicine Prices: Why Higher Prices Might Actually Save More Lives (and Money)

When we hear about rising medicine prices, the instinctive reaction is concern, and for good reason. Millions of people struggle to afford essential medications, and access to healthcare should never depend on your wallet. But the debate around drug pricing isn’t as black-and-white as it seems. In fact, setting prices too low could actually have damaging effects on the future of global healthcare, both ethically and economically.

Let’s explore why.

🧪 Innovation Needs Investment

Pharmaceutical companies face enormous costs in bringing a single drug to market, often over $1 billion, with years or even decades of research, testing, and regulatory hurdles. Most drugs fail somewhere along the journey. If prices are too low, companies can’t recoup their losses or fund future R&D.

Without this investment:

• Fewer new drugs get developed.

• Promising but “unprofitable” diseases (like rare or neglected ones) get ignored.

• Smaller companies may go bankrupt, reducing competition even further.

Far from being greedy, some profit is what powers innovation, without it, we risk slowing the entire engine of medical progress.

🏥 Innovation = System-Wide Savings

Here’s the twist: more expensive drugs can actually lead to lower costs overall if they dramatically improve health outcomes.

Take a few examples:

• A cure for hepatitis C may cost tens of thousands up front, but it eliminates the need for lifetime care and liver transplants—saving hundreds of thousands per patient.

• New cancer therapies or better diabetes treatments can reduce hospital stays, complications, and long-term care costs.

• Mental health innovations could ease pressure on emergency services, justice systems, and social support networks.

So when we underfund innovation, we’re not just delaying progress, we’re also potentially locking ourselves into more expensive, less effective care for decades to come.

⚖️ The Ethical Tradeoff: Access vs Progress

There’s no doubt: affordable access to medicine is a moral imperative. People should never have to choose between rent and insulin.

But what if limiting prices today means missing out on a future treatment that could have saved millions more lives or reduced the burden on already stretched health systems? That’s an ethical dilemma, too.

The challenge lies in finding the balance—ensuring prices are fair and people can access existing treatments, while still encouraging bold research that leads to the next big breakthrough.

🛠️ A Case for Raising Minimum Medicine Prices

Many countries already set minimum price thresholds for medicines to stabilize markets and prevent predatory pricing. But as the cost of research, development, and regulatory approval continues to rise, it's time to consider raising those thresholds, to protect long-term innovation and ensure system sustainability.

By modestly increasing these price floors, governments could:

• Support continued innovation by ensuring companies—especially smaller ones—can cover the growing costs of drug development.

• Avoid market consolidation, where only the biggest players survive in low-price environments, reducing competition and diversity.

• Encourage R&D in less profitable areas, like rare diseases or emerging health threats, by making them more economically viable.

This isn’t about making all drugs expensive, it's about recognizing their value and making sure the system keeps producing better, smarter treatments that ultimately reduce long-term healthcare costs.

And what about other countries with different price registration mechanism? Same story, prices should be fixed in a way with huge and quick decays are avoided, since such a business case would no longer be interesting for any company in the world.

🚀 The Bottom Line

Drug pricing is a deeply emotional and complex issue. But raising prices isn’t always unethical, sometimes, it’s necessary to ensure the long-term health of both people and the systems that serve them.

To put it simply, higher prices can actually create a healthier, more competitive market. Here's how the logic works:

• Higher prices provide greater incentives for pharmaceutical companies to invest in research and development.

• This leads to more companies entering the market, which increases competition.

• More competition means more treatment options for patients, improving healthcare outcomes.

• Ultimately, more alternatives help reduce overall healthcare costs, as more effective and diverse treatments become available.

Instead of focusing only on price tags, we should ask: What is the real value of a medicine? And how do we build a system where access and innovation walk hand in hand?

Or in plain words:

Higher minimum prices → more incentive to innovate → more market entrants → more treatment alternatives → lower overall healthcare costs