▲ | aDyslecticCrow 5 days ago | |
Most medical research doesn't go up in smoke if it didn't lead to a production drug. And i don't argue R&D isn't a larger portion of what pharmaceutical companies do. Although the statistics is old (2017), its interesting to compare the $2.2 billion total spent by all US healthcare companies listed (2017) compared to the $38 billion tax money spent by the NHS on research grants to medical research 2024. (80% of their budget of $48 billion) Even assuming very generous increase of the medical research budget since 2017, makes N.H.S. research grants a significant portion of medical research that the expensive drugs supposedly cover? https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget And again, this is somehow only an issue in the US. Why does European and Asian pharmaceutical companies produce cheaper drugs and cutting edge medical research as a competitive rate, if the high cost of the drugs is to needed to keep them afloat? The statistics you sent also seem to show non-us pharmaceutical companies regularly spent more % of their revenue on R&D. What gives? --- And again, i didn't single-out pharmaceutical companies specifically. I blamed all of US medical industry, from the hospital to the insurance. The pharmaceutical companies seem to charge quite reasonable prices to the insurance companies. Odd how much more it costs to buy it without insurance though (the cost is to cover R&D right?.... right?) --- I'll be even more spicy. If your goal it so save as many people as possible, and R&D truly is single-handedly the reason drugs and drugs and medical care is so expensive (which i think is blatantly incorrect); The US should just stop doing R&D entirely. You could save vastly more lives with the drugs already in existence, which is prevented because the US healthcare system is so fundamentally broken. But i don't think it would do squat because there are a lot of other things affecting the price of drugs and healthcare than that. Cutting out R&D not do squat on healthcare costs. |