It really depends how the pharmaceutical company is using its quadruple profits. If it is using them for executive compensation, returns to the investors, and gold plated fountains, that's one thing. The corporation could be focused on the short term extraction of as much money from as many dying people as possible.
However, the corporation (and its investors) focusing on long term profits and long term good is not incompatible with charging quadruple the price for its existing drugs. Bringing in more money faster means having more money to reinvest on R&D to research more new cures faster. In which case, double the price again if insurance companies will keep paying it.
At the end of the day those obscene profits are coming from insurance premiums spread over nearly the entire population, making it effectively a private sector tax. If that tax is, in fact, largely going to cancer research, I'm OK with it.
Of course, I'd personally prefer a public sector tax that I knew was going to research and not gold-plated fountains.
Good points. A system with universal private health insurance and pharma companies that reinvest all their profits into research seems equivalent to a system with publicly funded research. (Of course, in private systems there are many uninsured people -- doubling the price of cancer treatments means, to some extent, funding future research from poor, sick people.)
However, the corporation (and its investors) focusing on long term profits and long term good is not incompatible with charging quadruple the price for its existing drugs. Bringing in more money faster means having more money to reinvest on R&D to research more new cures faster. In which case, double the price again if insurance companies will keep paying it.
At the end of the day those obscene profits are coming from insurance premiums spread over nearly the entire population, making it effectively a private sector tax. If that tax is, in fact, largely going to cancer research, I'm OK with it.
Of course, I'd personally prefer a public sector tax that I knew was going to research and not gold-plated fountains.