What I'm talking about is medicines that are donated, sold with differential pricing, or assigned 'voluntary licenses' to increase medical access in underdeveloped countries. Voluntary license medicines are required to be produced with substantially different appearances from their developed-nation analogues, specifically so that they won't be exported back to undercut those products.
All of those programs are fundamentally good things which save lives, but they lead to some pretty strange outcomes and in turn strange reporting. It can be vastly cheaper to obtain a medicine in an underdeveloped country with supply shortages than in the first world, and that sometimes also prompts articles saying that such-and-such a medicine "only costs 10 cents in other countries!" As far as I know, this is mostly an issue in the US; most other high-differential-price countries have socialized healthcare or other functional solutions like Singapore's, but the US has a lot of extremely poor people who end up paying much higher prices than equally impoverished people abroad.
https://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/documents/s17815en/s17815e...
Not everyone agrees with that statement.
First of all, purchasing negotiations are all secret. US manufactures could very well be saying one thing, and doing another.
Donald Trump said something along those lines some time ago, calling EU "Freeloaders". There is a Wall Street Journal article echoing his comments.
Here's an answer from EU's Health Commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis:
https://sciencebusiness.net/news/drug-prices-row-eu-health-c...
tl;dr: according to him, Trump was just lying.