Medical research spending in the US is approximately $500/person/year. The medical cost gap between the US and other countries is approximately $3,500/person/year. R&D spending simply does not account for for anything close to the huge discrepancy in costs.
You're missing the point. High prices for drugs, procedures, and medical devices in the United States are what makes their development financially feasible. Without the American market, the expected payoff to new medical technologies would be much lower, so it's reasonable to believe that fewer would be commercialized.
Americans bear the bulk of these costs, which are passed along in the price of their treatments, because much of the rest of the world has instituted price caps that are too low to cover the full cost of R&D, from basic science to a product approved for sale. (These treatments are nevertheless available in other countries because the marginal cost of synthesizing a pill or building a device that's already been developed is low.) It's a classic free-rider problem.
Medical R&D in the US amounts to about $100 billion/year. (I misremembered a slightly higher number previously, but the ballpark is the same.) Meanwhile, the US is spending in the neighborhood of $1 trillion/year more on health care than if spending were on the same level as a typical European country. Yes, I understand that those R&D costs get baked into medical costs, but they simply don't account for the vast majority of the discrepancy.
If the US system cost the same as a typical European system with the exception of US R&D spending on top, the discrepancy would only be around 10% of what it actually is.
Gotta love the level of idiocy in this entire thread. Americans are being really (and irrationally) delusional here, without any data to back up anything being said.
It really amazes me how there are controversial topics where one side never presents any actual facts or figures to back up their stance. I would think that, in the absence of any hard evidence, the controversy would disappear. Yet it seems that anecdote and rhetoric alone are enough to sustain extreme controversy. Both health care and climate change in the US are excellent examples of this.
Edit: the statement about R&D costs is one excellent example of this. This thread is not the first place I've heard it, by any means. It's inevitably framed as the US subsidizing the rest of the world but without any quantitative analysis of it. The assertion evaporates when you actually look at the numbers, of course. Another excellent example was when my father claimed, no doubt prompted by right-wing talk radio, that the life expectancy gap was driven by the much higher murder rate in the US compared to European countries. Upon plugging in the numbers, I found that, assuming an absolute worst case (every murdered American is an infant, losing all ~80 years of life), dropping the US murder rate to zero would increase American life expectancy by six months.
I get how people can be wrong sometimes, but the way it spreads, the way people hear things and never check them or even apply a basic smell test, and the way these complete falsehoods manage to shape national debate is just crazy.
