system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why pharmaceutical prices in the USA is a thousand times more than the same drug sold in a developong country

For example, here in Bangladesh 20mg of Fluoxetine (Brand name Prozac) costs 0.037 USD while in the USA it costs 7.5 USD per tablet at Walmart. 

That is just insane!! These two drugs have the exact same material yet their prices are a thousand times different. Can someone ELI5 why this is so?
gpt
About 200 years ago, commercial developers were facing a problem. It cost money to invent something new, but once you invented it it was really cheap for a craftsman to take it apart and build it themselves. Governments feared that new technology development would cease altogether. Their solution was to grant a short-term monopoly on any new invention, allowing inventors to reap all of the benefits of their investments to make it profitable to improve them.

Once you have a monopoly, you gain access to a bunch of tools to make money. Instead of charging about what it costs to make something, you charge whatever price will get you the most profit by figuring out how many people will buy at each price, multiplying that number by the profit per unit at that price, then picking the most profitable price.

The American market is most profitable at the price they set in America. In Bangladesh, though, the most profitable price is lower. So they set different prices in different areas, arguing that otherwise their most profitable move would be to charge American prices everywhere, denying developing nations access at all. As that would be a thing that would actually happen, governments agreed, granting discount drugs to developing nations while improving the profit of drug companies over all.

So, basically, the companies charge the 'real' price in developed nations that they need to to make their research budgets work, then charge a production-cost price in developing nations that wouldn't be able to access the drug otherwise. Everyone wins - you get new drugs being developed all the time (which you pay for), and Bangladesh gets the drugs that they can barely afford to produce.