According to your article, in the case of vaccines for early childhood diseases, the answer to the drug companies' lament is to take government and its buying power out of the marketplace.

The reason government is in the marketplace is that schools require a certain suite of immunizations for children to be admitted to school. This means that the only children not required to get vaccinated are those who are home schooled (who will be required to get most of the shots eventually, if they hope to go to college) or those who are among the disappeared or abducted children in the US and thus not attending school.

When the government makes something mandatory, the requirement is accompanied by the responsibility to see to it that everyone has the means to fulfill the requirement. This translates into inexpensive and in some cases free vaccines, provided by the government, using its big economic power.

Case in point: we had an exchange student who had never had a rubella vaccination. He was 17 years old at the time of his visit. The public school would not admit him without the vaccination. So, rather than pay the cost for our private doctor to vaccinate him (pre-HMO, and exchange students have different rules anyway), I took him to the nearest clinic that takes care of such things. They do free school vaccinations on Tuesdays. Ta daah.

So it's simple, really. Take away the requirement that all children be vaccinated. Then government will no longer have the need to purchase the vaccine to allow citizens to comply with the requirement, and the price can float up to whatever the poor starving drug companies want it to be. Some children will go unvaccinated, and will doubtless become ill. Perhaps that will excite the nation to examine thoroughly the issues of public health and private insurance.

I heard about a book over the weekend: The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It by Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. I saw Dr. Angell do a Q&A at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Book TV. It doesn't look like it will be especially fun to read, but it sounds important enough to pursue.