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The pharmaceutical industry is often vilified in today's society as greedy, cold, and evil. Of course, simply looking at prices of drugs can reinforce this thought. These are life-saving medications, after all, and clearly people aren't able to afford these outrageous costs. To properly understand this pricing absurdity, it is crucial to also understand the process of drug approval by the FDA. The FDA rightfully mandates that drugs go through stages of development-referred as the pipeline in the industry-to ensure efficacy, safety, and reproducibility. Throughout the journey of identification, R&D, and clinical trials, the cost to bring a drug successfully to market is around $2.6 billion. In addition to this, only ~12% of drugs that are presented to the FDA for clinical development are approved. Just this year, only 26 drugs have been approved. Considering the number of drug companies throughout the United States, this number is extremely low. It is only logical that with such a market that these drug companies are forced into, prices of drugs that are actually approved need to be as high as possible to ensure profitability. Instead of the rhetoric heard around the country today that vilifies big pharma, maybe the conversation should be shifted to the broken healthcare system that encourages this kind of behavior in the first place.