Why are you moving the goalposts by now requiring the country in question to "create as many new drugs as the US"? I don't see how that relates to this discussion at all.

Many new drugs are developed in European countries. This is not something that's unique to the US. Americans just pay more for the same drugs.

> Many new drugs are developed in European countries. This is not something that's unique to the US. Americans just pay more for the same drugs.

About 50% of all R&D worldwide happens in the US. The US's global share has shrunk a bit, but only because China and India have grown rapidly, not because Europe has ramped up (it hasn't).

Some new drugs are developed in European countries, or by European pharmaceutical companies - that's true. But European pharmaceutical companies all make a disproportionate amount of their revenue off of sales in the US market. So Europeans quite literally benefit the most from the fact that Americans pay more for the same drugs.

Yeah, but that's America's choice to pay so much more for drugs that the rest of the world pays less for. It doesn't make the US system in any way better.

> Yeah, but that's America's choice to pay so much more for drugs that the rest of the world pays less for. It doesn't make the US system in any way better.

Yes, I agree that it's a foolish choice for the US to subsidize foreign countries' healthcare in this manner. Regardless of this decision that we both agree is foolish, it means that it's misleading to compare cost-effectiveness between the US and other countries directly.

I disagree. You can still compare. There's nothing that requires the US to subsidise corporations. They just choose to do so by not negotiating lower prices.

switzerland has way more new drug patents (per capita) and universal healthcare

Switzerland (unfortunately) doesn't have what I (as an Australian) would recognise as universal healthcare. It's very similar to the "public option" to use the US terminology. It is still closer to modern healthcare than the US, but it's not the same thing (and suffers from problems that other more progressive healthcare systems do not suffer from).

> suffers from problems that other more progressive healthcare systems do not suffer from

Can you elaborate? Genuinely interested in the details.

That’s because several major pharmaceutical companies are head quartered there - not because the actual research is done there.