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Comment by throwaway-1209 | Hacker News Reader

They have different cost structures and much higher taxes, and their healthcare couldn't exist without multi billion research efforts US healthcare consumer pays for. How much pharmaceutical innovation is there outside the US?

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There are many multi billion dollar companies that do pharmaceutical research outside the US, their revenue is not exclusively from the US, suggesting there would be no healthcare without the US, is like suggesting there would be no cars without the US

[Roche](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoffmann-La_Roche) [Merck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merck_Group) [Bayer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer) [Sanofi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanofi)

Merck is a US company. Switzerland has no government provided healthcare and their healthcare costs are also very high.

Merck isn't a US company, it is a German company. There is a US company with the same name that originates from a seizure of US assets of the German company with the same name.

Also known as the Merck that actually invents new drugs and rakes in almost three times the revenue of the German counterpart. I wonder if the fact that it's a US company has something to do with that. Hmm.

You are making factual claims without providing evidence. It might be true that advancements in healthcare wouldn't be st the level it is today without the U.S. but to ascertain that their healthcare wouldn't exist without the U.S. is clearly incorrect.

Even supposing all pharmaceutical innovation comes from the U.S. still does not show that without the U.S. there would be none. Clearly there is a market for drugs and the U.S. is not the only country with research capabilities.

Taxes are not that much higher elsewhere. People are not being taxed to death elsewhere.

You're saying the rest of the world is so poor, their health care systems are bouyed as a /side effect/ of the research that companies do, financed by the their average American customer?

They aren't poor. But for some reason they don't like to pay for drugs, R&D or defense. That's gotta change.

Why does it have to change? It's a free market, internationally. Perhaps if they don't want to pay for drugs, drug companies should stop selling to them.

How's education related to pharmaceutical innovation? How's single payer health care related to it, anyway?

It seems the barbarians are certainly at the gates. Oh well, we had a good ride.

Our education system and business environment produces a hell of a lot more innovation (including pharma) than the rest of the world produces combined. The rest of the world then piggy backs on all that and invests diddly squat into R&D, all while being smug about their social safety net. Don't be so quick to dismiss the US way of doing things. While imperfect, it's not beyond repair either.

I'll ask again. Do you have any evidence to back up your claims? You are arguing by assertion. Where is the evidence your assertions are correct?

So your position is that it's good that it's illegal to arbitrage prescription drugs across the US border? I'd love to hear more.

No. I'd love to see lower drug pricing in the US. One must understand, hovewer that this will cause the prices to rise everywhere else. Which is quite all right with me. About time those folks started paying their fair share. They might even get their own pharma research going if they have to pay through their nose like we do.

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