mRNA vaccine research was funded in large part by DARPA grants in the USA.

I appreciate that R&D funding requires investment, but that doesn't have much to do with hospital reimbursement rates -- especially when the alternative of a more European-style healthcare system comes along with a German company inventing one of the two Covid vaccines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioNTech)..

"European-style" isn't so much of a thing. There are all sorts of models. BioNTech is a public listed for-profit company that partnered with Pfizer, a public listed for-profit company, to develop that vaccine.

There needs to be lots of profit in healthcare for anyone to do anything, or even to be in a position to do anything.

Of course there's a European style in contrast to the American style.. Single payer coverage governed by a government/quasi-government body with no profit taking and rates for drugs and care negotiated by the payer. Some have free point-of-service care, some have copayments, some have private insurance or supplemental insurance but the contours are the same.

There are dozens of huge pharma companies in Europe inventing life-saving drugs with plenty of profits to go around, this conceit that we need to price gouge Americans to pay for Research while the same firms spend more on marketing than R&D is just the dumbest thing.

European drugs are often funded by their profits from America.

Just a completely evidence-free claim that's repeated ad nauseam. The big European pharmas (along with the big US ones) are repurchasing shares on the order of tens of billions of dollars per year. If they're so reliant on excess profits to fund R&D, maybe they should have held onto those funds?

Go look at Pfizer revenue from US vs Europe. Europe has more people, but less than half the revenue in a typical year.

Americans are indeed subsidizing new drugs for the entire world.

Present Pfizer as if it's primarily serving the German market is silly. Pfizer by revenue is primarily in the US market.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/267877/revenues-of-pfize...

It's not evidence free. One of the things single payer does is negotiate discounts based on their whole country's population. That's going to fund ops and a bit of profit, not R&D.

> If they're so reliant on excess profits to fund R&D

R&D money comes from profits. It's not specific to the pharma industry. They just have particularly enormous R&D costs.