Here's the page on pharma. The biggest underline point is that the entire R&D budget is less than $50 billion, so that can't explain more than a bit of the ~$1 *trillion* of "too expensive" in our health care system.
That said, I think you can make a case that there are subtle effects here: that Big Pharma is essentially using R&D as a Big Lie to justify prices that are far out of line. That is, they are *claiming* that we are subsidizing the rest of the world more than we really are, when in fact it's more pure price-gouging than anything else. This seems to be a common meme I'm picking out here -- in several areas, our actual *prices* are far greater than the *costs* used to justify them. The implication there is that there's a political/marketing problem that is far greater than the real economic one in some areas...
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Date: 2010-12-26 08:35 pm (UTC)That said, I think you can make a case that there are subtle effects here: that Big Pharma is essentially using R&D as a Big Lie to justify prices that are far out of line. That is, they are *claiming* that we are subsidizing the rest of the world more than we really are, when in fact it's more pure price-gouging than anything else. This seems to be a common meme I'm picking out here -- in several areas, our actual *prices* are far greater than the *costs* used to justify them. The implication there is that there's a political/marketing problem that is far greater than the real economic one in some areas...