filtherton

I'm not too familiar with pharmacy economics, but I'm pretty sure that most pharmaceutical companies are multinationals and that European regulatory hurdles are even higher than in the US.

Also, it would be nice to know how much drug companies actually spend on R&D as opposed to marketing, but alas, the only sources for that type of information are drug companies themselves and they apparently aren't too keen on enumerating their expenses that specifically.

Also also, government frequently plays a large part in the germination of new treatments and technologies via publicly funded research institutions which take ideas from the notebook and test their feasibility via translational research.

I shed no tears for the pharmaceutical industry.


Finally, it's easy to blame the ills of society on government meddling because most of us are completely unfamiliar with how society would be without a meddling government. However, it is for precisely this reason that anyone who claims to understand the effects of ending government meddling is full of shit. Despite the rainbow tinted pictures they often paint, libertarians don't know what would happen if their dreams came true. I suspect that things would likely get unbearably bad before they got better, and that's assuming that they'd get better at all.