Comment by onraglanroad
7 hours ago
> the existence of America's prescription drug markets drives the new innovative drugs that the rest of the world picks up for cheap.
That's the ludicrous propaganda that you've been fed but you really should be intelligent enough to dismiss it.
The world would get along just fine without you overpaying for your drugs. You pay for marketing costs.
Mostly not marketing (still large), but the R&D costs and clinical trial costs. The latter are in hundreds of millions to billions range for the entire journey from a promising discovery to an FDA-approved medicine.
Every time Ive looked into it marketing is more than half of the costs of US pharma companies - and I would suspect even more as don't know if there has much work to unmask even more of that spending via channels that can occur in ways not obviously marked as marketing or at least are really not core to research and manufacturing.
e.g. is all the "discount coupon" pharmacy rigamarole considered marketing or administration.
Why not just research it outside of the US if the problem is the FDA cost
You still need the same FDA approval and process to sell it in the US
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Right, but the idea that Americans specifically should pay higher prices is beyond propaganda. It's Stockholm Syndrome-level delusion. Big Pharm has thrived for generations on our research universities (for the time being anyway) and had a front row seat to expanding foreign markets under US-led globalization. In return, we get the world's most expensive healthcare system and the privilege of paying too much for meds because our leaders won't cut a deal. All they have to lose is the "hundreds of millions to billions range" in annual lobbying expenditures by Big Pharma.
In a sane world - or literally any other country - that $300-$500 million in annual lobbying would be the literal difference that makes medicine accessible for those who need it. Instead, it goes to expensive lunches.