I can’t afford a new car. The government should negotiate a fair price for me.
/s
Of course, there are a few things wrong. Congress could do some things, like, allow more generics to be produced. Insulin should be cheap but drug companies find new ways to “patent” a variation or new delivery system of the same old generic drug. Drug companies manipulate the process, and the drug trials to get approval since the rules are written they know how to design a trial to jump through the loopholes.
They hardly develop anything anyway. They let private sector investment develop new drugs all the way up to around Phase 3 clinical trials, then the big pharma buys these new drugs. Most of the time these new drugs are only marginally better than the old drugs. They may be better in some subset of patients. But that doesn’t stop them from marketing them as if they are better. I was on a generic pill, my doctor recommended a new one. My co-pay was $400 a month on the new one, $2 for the old generic. No thanks. The old pill worked fine so my doctor agreed to prescribe the old one purely for financial reasons. But later I researched it, the new pill was more likely to cause bleeding, but had marginally better results for about 12% of people - of which I was not one. I don’t think half the doctors study these things.
No idea what this has to do with the constitutionality of forcing someone to sell at an arbitrary price (and also being forced to publicly agree that it was "fair" in an Orwellian fashion).
Patenting a new variation would not prevent the existing generic version from being sold. But again, I don't know what this has to do with this bizarre legislation.