Big Pharma's Greed Kills For Profits

Ocasio-Cortez was keen to make the point that the problem was not with just one bad apple, but the system that allows such a practice to take place. "Every single developed country in the world guarantees healthcare except the United States because we can't get it together, because we don't have the fortitude to kick pharmaceutical lobbyists outside of our congressional offices"we can't even reform our own political system to make sure that we are more responsive to the people,"she said.

A systemic problem requires a systemic solution, according to Baker. "Drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture. They end up being expensive because of patent and related monopolies," he explains. He advocates for creating a publicly financed pharmaceutical research network, where the taxpayer pays for medical research upfront and all inventions or drugs that come out of it are publicly available.

"I would look to replace patent monopoly supported research with direct public funding. This could be done by the same companies that do research now. The difference would be that under the system I envision they would get long-term contracts, with the condition that all findings be posted as soon as practical (so other researchers could benefit) and that all patents would be placed in the public domain so that they could be sold as generics from day one" he told MintPress.

Baker also supports Sanders' plan to buy up patents so the government can release them to the public, drastically reducing drug prices. But until the day that the U.S. moves towards a system based on health rather than profit, cases like Gilead's will be all too common, as, driven by the logic of capitalism, corporations put profit before people.

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