> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38
It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.
You really aren't making the point you think you are. We are talking about a drug discovered (Poland) more than 100 years ago, isolated (Japan) more than 100 years ago, synthesized (England, Germany) more than 100 years ago. Then wrapped in a device basically developed by the US army in the 1970s. So how does letting an mostly uninvolved private US company set prices arbitrarily lead to more of this sort of development? For completeness, I'll note Merck did real work in improving the delivery mechanism (after a couple of recalls), but the heavy lifting was as above. Merck is of course German, not US, but it went through one or two US companies before landing there, if I recall correctly, and then Mylan acquired marketing rights in the US. Without new development, Mylan ran the price up about 6x over the 2009-2016 years (to a margin of about 95%) , which is what caused all the pricing fuss.
More generally, while I know what you are getting at you have to be careful with this sort of statement "this is the only way to do the drug development" is a pharma industry talking point but it is largely bullshit (although not entirely, the model run in the US does make it quite expensive and that can't be fully supported the way it is on, say, generics pricing).
It is true that the US is more productive in this space per capita than most places (but not as much as many think) , but it is really difficult to determine if this is primarily due to fundamental capacity, or due to financial incentives...
And check where these R&D spenders make the most money in the world. In the US. There would be no such level of investment if the US market did not exist.
Note, per capita it looks like most of the countries studied are discovering new drugs (in the study's terminology "new molecular entity") at much faster rate than the United States when adjusted for population.
The money quote:
" Our data suggest that the United States is important but not disproportionate in its contribution to pharmaceutical innovation. Interestingly, some countries with direct price control, profit control, or reference drug pricing appeared to innovate proportionally more than their contribution to the global GDP or prescription drug spending"
Denmark is so tiny compared to the US, it hardly makes sense to compare drug discovery per cápita. If Denmark happens to release just a single extra drug one year, it totally shifts their ratio.
Drug prices have absolutely nothing to do with where the drug is developed. AstraZeneca being Swedish never prevented Swedes from having a yearly out of pocket maximum at $120.
Roche, Novartis, AZN, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi,GSK and on and on. You could hardly pick a worse sector than healthcare to make this kind of nonsense America first point.
It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.