How does that make it reasonable to close and effectively keep medicine away from people unless they pay more than cost price? Of course if some countries can not produce it themselves they will buy it from other countries. Having an open recipe just means factories will only be able to compete on price and quality; not on secret recipe.

I don't understand why we allow capitalistic control of medicine at all. The goal should be to maximize health, not profit. And in many ways, directly through subsidizing and indirectly by providing the wealthy infrastructure and schooling etc the public are already paying for medicine research anyhow. Why not go all the way and make it public altogether?

But I guess I'm a bit of an idealist..