Production costs have little to do with pricing…the reason generics are so cheap is they’re made from reverse engineering the initial product.
Yeah it might cost a “name brand” drug company $.001 to make the little blue pill…but the R&D costs to design that pill are in the millions. Add into that all the drugs that they put millions into and never hit the market and you have very very high “costs”. That’s why there are patents on drugs, so the companies can make back the costs and then turn profit before generics are allowed to get their hands on them.
Don’t get me wrong, drug companies are still profit whores…but it’s not as cut and dry as it seems sometimes.
I also think that life critical drugs should be heavily controlled in pricing and subsidized by gov’ts around the world so that a “cancer pill” or AIDS vaccine (if they’re ever developed) costs the equivalent to $1 US in every country in the world.