You are right, and I altered a comment below to reflect this. I was trying to make a more general point and phrased it poorly.
The general point is: the reason drug costs are high because of two things working together:
1) Pharma continually refreshes patents by making modest, but real, improvements to things that are generically available.
2) Patients will not accept any level of increased health risk, no matter how much the cost increases in exchange for decreased risk.
The result of these two things is that even though we have generics available for almost every major disease, they are rarely used, and we are always using the patented versions which are orders of magnitude more expensive. And then we have people wondering why health care is so expensive.
It would be absolutely bizarre if it were any other area of the economy. Imagine if every person insisted on owning a sports car because they go 20% faster. But because we (the public in general) continue on insisting that no price can be placed on marginal increases human life or health -- despite the huge logical contradictions that result from this -- we cannot have rational discussions about how to actually keep health care affordable.
