Comment by marcus_holmes

Are we seeing better outcomes, though?

Because the USA pays massively more than anyone else for its medicine, it's logical that the USA has more pharma industry, producing more medicine, than anyone else.

But because the US Pharma industry is profit-driven, as TFA says, it is interested in making only profitable medicine. And as TFA says, curing things may not be profitable.

If the USA adopted socialised medicine, would we see less drugs but better outcomes? Would the pharma industry get more spread out, and less focused on making vast piles of cash in the USA and more focused on actual cures for everyone?

Put it like this: does a hypothetical Indian biochemistry genius with a passion for solving hard pharmaceutical problems work on some interesting but tricky disease in India that could save millions of lives, or do they go to the USA to earn lots of money creating expensive drugs for not-so-many rich people that doesn't even cure them?