American pharmaceutical companies are just as evil as the military industrial complex. Change my view.

Change my view.

Treating cancer is more profitable than curing it. That’s really all anyone needs to know about that industry.

insurance companies are worse than any pharmaceutical company and its not even close

Disagree. Pharma companies ultimately do something beneficial (make medicine) versus military companies that do something evil (make weapons for imperialism.) of course, their execs should be hanged for their capitalist exploitation all the same.

I've thought about this particular question a lot because I interact with both pretty much daily because of my area. But I've come to a resolute conclusion.

I think it's not really the case. The function pharma companies fulfill is what gives them the power to extort so much money out of people and put that suffering on them, get them addicted and keep them paying exorbitant bills. There obviously is blood on the hands of the executives and strategists that run those companies, no doubt. But I wouldn't look at someone the same way if I found out they did as much as work an internship at Raytheon. Huge, huge difference between working at a company that produces a good which is so necessary it's got people in debt slavery for the rest of their lives, where as a worker you're just figuring out more cost effective ways to produce medicine; and a company that is enabling the ransacking, r*pe, and genocide of the imperial periphery. There's a reason those ghouls have to literally groom young girls to get more people in the industry: people know how evil it is, no question. Every single person that's ever set foot in a MIC company as anything more than a security guard will surely not see justice, but let me say that if they do, I'll be surprised they found a way to make justice for the kind of thing they deserve for that.

Gilead could make PrEP freely available to people and reduce the transmission of HIV, but that wouldn't be profitable.

Also hepatitis c is curable, but hell if the average person can afford it.

why would anyone here seek to change that view, why did you phrase it like that?

purge the reddit from your soul please

Fun fact: My chronic illness medication originally cost 6000 dollars. They had a co-pay assistance program which ended when a generic version of that same medication.

Aaaaand the generic medication was 2000 as opposed to 6000.

It's profiting from human suffering in a very direct way and it's basically stealing billions of dollars out of people's pockets every day with price gouging and copyright protectionism and insurance bullshit

This is the correct take and health care executives deserve

The only reason this isn't true is that the pharma companies occasionally develop a drug that cures a disease, like hep C. And then they charge out the ass for it so nobody can afford it, sure.

Also I would like to point out that conspiracy-theorizing that companies are suppressing a "cure" for cancer is dumb as fuck, scientifically illiterate, and just a way to show you don't understand the basic nature of cancer as a category of disease.

for years, i just thought of pharmaceutical companies as another shitty type of corporation doing shitty things, knowing they were generallycomplicit in the prohibition / War on Drugs etc. maybe about 9 years ago, i stumbled upon a deeper investigation into the historical context of pharmaceutical companies as critical building blocks of empire itself.

in her book, Suzanna Reiss makes a potent case for the capital formations of/behind pharmaceutical corporations being uniquely powerful in the direction, strategy and prosecution of American empire, both at home and the later shoring up / hollowing out of resistance to it domestically. she did an interview in 2015 talking about the book in depth here, in audio format.

it's an interesting bit of research that took her down this path, because she started out not realizing how deep into history the connections would go (Opium Wars!) and how openly the public-private "partnerships" communicated as a matter of public record.

personally, i think you're right. among the very first moves in a revolution would to nationalize them, void all of their intellectual property, democratize their production lines among the workers and the communities where they are located, and imprison their executives.

I think it's different in that pharma companies do harm to Americans whereas the MIC exports harm to other people. While on one level no one life is more valuable than any other life, I think it's relevant to consider that the American people could theoretically exercise political and regulatory power over pharma companies whereas the victims of the US MIC have no power to oppose it outside of war.