Probably you are a soft recruit to "they got better' numbers for post trial marketing but even then, it's like a Ford is $30,000 or $3 depending how easily it can be sold.
okay well, let's say you were to model "what explains the price of something" and you had two factors in your model, "markets" and "politics." most good models will have a residual which means "everything else."
when i say "low risk" to commercialization, i could mean a lot of things. it depends on what the drug category is.
if you develop the only cure for an otherwise fatal, pediatric, congenital disease, the parents will be willing to pay an unlimited amount of money for it. so there's no market price for it. so we know that, no matter what, a correct model for that is, 0% market. this is really, extremely difficult for most people who look at this issue, because it renders their opinions about what should you pay for this drug basically moot. they'll all have different answers. so the numbers of our independent variable, "price people are willing to pay" will be uncorrelated with the price people actually pay. and this is one of those instances where the absence of correlation means no causation. instead of looking cogently at this situation and saying, "well, okay, maybe i should temper my outrage about drug pricing in this actually very important scenario" they just get more outraged.
so what factors are left: political and everything else? well, the drug is effective, it's a cure, this describes a lot of drugs. that's what we are talking about, effective drugs. the FDA process has ALSO attacked the importance of market pricing from this angle too, the clinical trials process here and how it has been standardized around the world basically works. so the residual, if it's about the efficacy of the drug, actually does NOT explain the price very much at all. this is counterintuitive!
this is why a CURE for a disease is not 10x more expensive than something that already exists and manages a disease. so...
what's left? my guess would be, the price would be explained by, okay, a lot of it will be political. like 90% political. this is what i mean by "low risk of commercialization." nobody is going to win an election being like, your kid should die.
are you getting it now? you are getting hung up on prices. you don't know the first thing about prices. you think the journey to understanding prices has to do with "$0.25 acetaminophen pill that somehow magically costs $10 in the hospital" and hospital charge lists or whatever, which is 200% wrong, that's a huge red herring.
prices in categories that are low commercialization risk are almost always explained by a political process. which is to say, all the innovations today in commercialization are political. that's bad. but that should also illuminate why, if I were running the FDA, that's where my focus would be - besides, at the rest of the HHS, 10x the basic science R&D budget.