> How many new drugs is Japan developing? From what I can tell, a fraction of what we do. The free market is pretty damn good at that.
Japan actually has a bunch of fairly major pharma companies that develop a lot of new drugs. You just don't hear their names in the US because the drugs get licensed to other companies when they're sold in the US and you only hear the name of the company that licensed them, but there are plenty of drugs that are commonly described in the US that were developed by Japanese pharma companies.
Local drug price regulations actually don't necessarily affect drug companies in a given country that much for this reason (they don't just develop drugs for the domestic market, and licensing to other countries to sell internationally is pretty much the norm).
However, in the case of the US it seems like the US pays a disproportionate amount of the total costs so it's possible that US drug price controls would affect pharma companies worldwide more than other countries' drug price controls. I'm not sure whether or not this can really be described as the free market doing a good job or not since the location where drugs are developed doesn't really affect their availability in other countries.
Japan actually has a bunch of fairly major pharma companies that develop a lot of new drugs. You just don't hear their names in the US because the drugs get licensed to other companies when they're sold in the US and you only hear the name of the company that licensed them, but there are plenty of drugs that are commonly described in the US that were developed by Japanese pharma companies.
Local drug price regulations actually don't necessarily affect drug companies in a given country that much for this reason (they don't just develop drugs for the domestic market, and licensing to other countries to sell internationally is pretty much the norm).
However, in the case of the US it seems like the US pays a disproportionate amount of the total costs so it's possible that US drug price controls would affect pharma companies worldwide more than other countries' drug price controls. I'm not sure whether or not this can really be described as the free market doing a good job or not since the location where drugs are developed doesn't really affect their availability in other countries.