The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new report from Johns Hopkins
It's worth noting that the U.S. market does pay for the lion's share of patented drugs, effectively funding a significant portion of R&D that benefits the whole world years later when generics come into market (at least for those drugs which are not costly to manufacture, which happen to be the majority).<p>I'm not saying this model is right. I'm just saying that doing away with it will have fundamental consequences to healthcare R&D<p>EDIT: To be clear, a minority of drugs are either very hard to manufacture (It's been a while for me so I don't recall their exact name, but I think they may be called "biosynthetics" – please correct me if I'm wrong) or researched for a very small number of patients (so-called "orphan drugs"), which confers them additional protection from generics and competitors. These generally have much higher prices than the "standard" drug.