But that's not equivalent to the statement "The US provides the funding for the majority of R&D that the rest of the world benefits from".
If you think that pharmaceutical companies should spend less of their money on R&D, or more on it, that's not really relevant. Whatever research pharmaceutical companies are doing, that's being disproportionately funded by the US market. That's a plainly evident statement; it's right there in their financial sheets.
> You could just as well say the US funds the majority of drug advertising for the entire world
No, because research is a wholly non-excusable good in the global market. Advertising is not.
> they spend more on ads than R&D
Again, not really the point.
Again you're looking at the wrong denominator (fraction of spending spent on R&D, rather than fraction of R&D spending that's funded by the US).
Furthermore, I never made any claims about "good and necessary". It looks like you're interested in having a discussion about a different topic altogether, rather than the original statement.
A statement entirely unsupported by data. If pharmaceutical companies spent on R&D only the money earned due the inflation of US prices, they'd still have plenty left over: http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2017/03/07/rd-costs-for-pharma...
You could just as well say the US funds the majority of drug advertising for the entire world - they spend more on ads than R&D: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28212223
Not to mention everything from vital new medicine, to reproducing generics of other companies, and drug reformulations to prolong patents, gets thrown under R&D. If you only count the R&D spending that's not done solely to steal market share from other companies, the ads vs. R&D ratio is even more dire.
So given they post more profits and more ad spending each than R&D spending, at what point would it be okay to stop raising drug prices? When profits are >10x their R&D?