I don’t know if this belongs as a “great debate” or not, but I had an idea occur to me, and I wonder what others think here about it.
Right now, American businesses are allowed to charge one price here, and completely different prices elsewhere in the world, for the very same products. Especially medicines. It’s why a sort of “dark” industry got going here, where Americans arrange to buy medicine made by US owned companies, from places like Canada, where they cost often less than a tenth of what they do here.
If we passed a law which required that all businesses operating both in and out of the US, charge the same price to everyone, what might the results be?
Note that in this thought-experiment, that businesses would still be able to use bulk-pricing as they wished, because that would still be equally available to anyone who bought in whatever quantities were involved.
I IMAGINE that businesses would do as they always do (aside from working behind the scenes at great cost to their customers to have the law repealed), and adjust their pricing to maximize sales and profits.
Part of the idea, would be to eliminate the present situation, where Americans are paying high prices so that non-Americans CAN get lower prices.
Among the many reasons this wouldn’t work is that in most cases medications are not sold in those other countries by “US companies”, but rather by local subsidiaries. Virtually every prescription medication in Canada, for instance, is sold by a Canadian subsidiary and in many cases manufactured in Canada, too, and in some cases was even developed from R&D wholly or partly done in Canada. The reverse is true, too: some drug companies operating in the US are actually subsidiaries of big offshore companies like Bayer, Sandoz, Astrazeneca, and many others. The US has no power over what any of these non-US companies do outside its own borders.
The main reason prescription drugs are often much cheaper in Canada is that prices are governed by a price review board that requires costs to be appropriately justified. IMHO this is the real answer to price gouging. The federal government has no power over international pricing in the global marketplace but it sure as hell has power over domestic drug pricing.
Companies charge multiple different prices here in the US for the same product. Try buying airline tickets, or Uber during surge pricing, or gas in two different cities. You can charge what the market will bear.