Turn it around: it's well established that bringing a drug to market costs 100s of millions of USD (R&D, Phase 1-3 trials, the long time and limited patent protection from that, all the failures along the way, etc.). Drug companies do not make large profits compared to other companies. Where does the money come from? Where can it come from?

I understand your argument, but the assumption it's based on - that pharmaceutical industry income is disproportionally financed by the USA when compared (per treatment) to other developed nations - requires supporting data.

Some sure indicates there are price controls, although curiously not in Germany per: http://www.taylorwessing.com/synapse/regulatory_pricecontrol...

NHS price controls are set below (much of?) the rest of the EU, resulting in diversion and shortages. Also, as is not surprising with monopsonies, some companies are ripping off the NHS on generics. You can find items on both with this search: https://www.google.com/search?q=nhs+drug+price+controls

According to the association that represents the pharmaceutical industry in Britain, the shortages you refer to were due to pharmacies taking advantage of exchange rate differences to sell medicines abroad rather than supply the UK market[1]. This would imply that the costs of medicine are not usually significantly lower than the rest of the EU, at least when the currency markets are not in flux.

There is some information available on the cost of prescription medicines in the UK (see [2]) but I don't know where the equivalent datasets would be for other countries. Would be interesting to do a comparison.

[1] http://www.abpi.org.uk/our-work/news/2012/Pages/280212.aspx

[2] http://www.hscic.gov.uk/searchcatalogue?q=title:"prescriptio...