It can be a fair proposition to ask a fully developed nation to invest more into pharmaceutical research.
Making the drugs once they are tested is the cheap part. Ensuring the drugs do what they are supposed to and don’t cause long term effects is extremely expensive.
The US spends about half of global spending on drug research, out spending all of Europe per
Pharma companies make well and truly enough profits to cover R&D. What we're talking about here is profit margins not adequate R&D budgets. The reason the numbers look like the US spends nearly 50% of the annual worldwide R&D spend is because many of the largest pharma companies are US headquartered (Eli Lilly, J&J, Merck, Pfizer). It's not as simple as "the US is paying for R&D for the world".. although that argument "sells" well when playing the victim. The simple fact is the reason pharma charge US residents more for drugs than is reasonable is because they can get away with doing so. One of the two big pharma companies I worked for (implementing finance systems internationally) sold as much in gross sales (in dollars, not volume) in the USA as they did in every other country in the world combined... that's simply due to margin.
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u/bshjbdkkdnd 4h ago
It can be a fair proposition to ask a fully developed nation to invest more into pharmaceutical research.
Making the drugs once they are tested is the cheap part. Ensuring the drugs do what they are supposed to and don’t cause long term effects is extremely expensive.
The US spends about half of global spending on drug research, out spending all of Europe per
https://efpia.eu/publications/data-center/the-pharma-industry-in-figures-rd/pharmaceutical-rd-expenditure-in-europe-usa-china-and-japan/