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.