Did you know the CEO of Mylan, the company that makes epipens made $98 million last year? Is that reasonable?
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/31/investing/epipen-mylan-chair...
The question was about how much R&D happens in single-payer counties, not how much one particular CEO made. I am a proponent of single-payer health care in the US but responding to unrelated, valid questions with, "yeah, but this one person made a lot of money and that makes me mad!" is ridiculous.
http://amp.timeinc.net/time/money/4502891/epipen-pricing-sca...
My point is that the entire for profit healthcare system in the US is broken, and it's time to burn it to the ground.
Excessive profits are waste.
> The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-dr...
Half of all medical and pharmaceutical research in the world is directly funded by the US. That number doesn't include indirect funding which takes place as well - for example, pharmaceutical companies that are based in Europe (such as Astra Zeneca) often receive the funding for their research from the US, and use additional indirect funding methods to essentially subsidize their research that takes place outside the research with the money they make in the US.
The US's market share of medical research has dropped a bit in recent years, but not because countries with single-payer systems are picking up the pace - it's because the research industries in China and India have grown incredibly fast in the last five years.