After graduating from Oxford, Sullivan quickly realized his pundit potential as a gay Catholic conservative, becoming editor of The New Republic in 1991. He resigned in 1996, around the same time he announced he had HIV, and his byline has been in demand ever since. Meanwhile, many fans in the gay community feel he has sold out to the right. But as a free-market advocate who is living with HIV, Sullivan is the perfect poster boy for the pharmaceutical industry. If you read it uncritically, Sullivan's prose goes down easy.
Some people say drugs cost too much.
But if we regulate profits, the companies won't be able to make such great pills. They need that money to pay for the drugs of the past, present, and future. Sure, only rich people can afford the new drugs, but once the patents run out, poor people will get the generics. But not everyone buys the rhetoric. Goozner argues that the industry exaggerates the cost of developing new drugs, takes credit for products that were developed largely in the public sector, and charges inflated prices for drugs that are not significantly more effective than those they were designed to replace.