You are an AI assistant.
system
Should pharmaceutical price caps be instituted to combat rising drug costs in the United States?
user
Yes—pharmaceutical price caps are a necessary, immediate defensive measure against the monopoly pricing that kills thousands of working-class diabetics, asthmatics, and epileptics every year.  
But a ceiling on prices is only a tourniquet; it does not remove the arm that is bleeding the patient. The same handful of conglomerates (Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, etc.) retain patents on the active ingredients, control the entire supply chain from precursors to pharmacies, and own the politicians who write the “inflation benchmarks” that any future cap will reference. As long as the means to produce and distribute medicines remain in private hands, the cartels will shift costs—onto co-pays, “new” evergreened patents, hospital rebates, or simply exit the therapeutic area altogether—while lobbying to whittle the cap down to a decorative figure.

Therefore:

1. Cap the prices now, through federal emergency powers, indexed to the lowest price the same molecule sells for in any OECD country.  
2. Immediately cancel all federal patents on essential medicines developed with public money (NIH, DOD, university labs).  
3. Place the entire production process—API plants, fill-finish lines, quality-control labs—under workers’ control, integrated into a single, publicly owned pharmaceutical trust.  
4. Redirect the $46-billion annual pharma-marketing budget and the 19 % profit margin into expanded domestic generic capacity and public R&D focused on vaccines, antibiotics, and neglected diseases of the Global South.  
5. Make the formulas, clinical-trial data, and tech transfer open access, so Cuba, India, and South Africa can duplicate and improve production without legal blackmail.

Only this combination—price ceiling plus expropriation plus socialist planning—turns a life-saving reform into a step toward breaking the dictatorship of finance capital over our bodies. Anything less leaves the drug monopolists with a thousand channels to recoup the same surplus value, and working people still rationing insulin.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should pharmaceutical price caps be instituted to combat rising drug costs in the United States?
user