For comparison, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world is Novartis, with annual revenues of approximately forty-seven billion dollars.[3]
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most, if not the most heavily regulated industry in the United States. This industry is also affected by various government interventions into research and development, both in funding and restricting options. If you believe there is a problem (and I think there is), it seems difficult to believe that it is due to a lack of government involvement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_He...
[2] http://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/fy2017-budget-in-brie...
Officials from government own stocks in corporations, serve on their boards, and often get cushy jobs in the very corporations they "regulated" or acquired government contracts for when they retire from "public service".
Corporate executives also demonstrate their selfless commitment to the public good by going to work for the government and regulate their former employers.
Corporations are taxed and that tax money flows from the government back to corporations. Corporations spend millions lobbying, bribing, and electing government officials to enact laws and contracts favorable to them. Often it's the same people who govern both corporations and the government, and profit from both.
They have their hands in each other's pockets and scratch each other's backs.
The drugs we have are warped by the abilities of people to make money off them. In fact, we can point to many "dead ends" where companies marketed drugs that were more expensive and worse than existing treatments.
I've personally witnessed a company taking an ingestable pill and turning it into a nurse-administered injection, just so they could take advantage of reimbursement. Same drug, but the patient suffers just so they can make more money.
The total budget of the DHHS is irrelevant. Only money that goes to researching unprofitable drugs would counter the assertion of the OP.
If you divide 1.1 trillion by 80k you get 13.75 Million per worker because they mostly hand out money to other organizations.
PS: If you campare US spending on heathcare per person you find the real issue is we let way to many other people in on the game. When you see a doctor chances are far more time is spent by other people not in the room mostly deciding who pays what than the doctor spends dealing with you. That's 95% pure waste and has little to do with heathcare. A doctor making 300k per year (~250k excluding benefits) only costs ~75$ per half an hour. Co pay can often more than pay for a doctors time.
This is the flip side of the good intentions of FDA's mandate.
This is the big problem with nutritional supplements and herbal medicine. You can't patent a plant, so there are all kinds of herbs people take that have never gone through double-blind testing. Some of them are probably efficacious.
I would not say mostly, although clinical trials are a large part of the cost. (Roughly speaking) For every drug that makes it through final approval, there are ten that failed in trials. However, for every drug that makes it into trials, there were ten that didn't - and the R&D for those unseen drugs is also a huge cost for pharma companies.
I don't think that this can be the solution though.