Why are patented drugs or medical devices your metric for a good health system. Those just sound like ways for people to profit from a sick population. If we had better health outcomes for citizens, I would cite that.
All science is based on the work of others, and it always has been.
I see a little chicken and egg problem here. This reminds of Stephen J. Gould’s Mismeasure of a Man. People would say that intelligence could be seen by measuring the size of the skull—knowing off course before hand that white people had the largest skull—and hence were the most intelligent (!) Until of course they actually measured the skulls properly, and found out it wasn’t any bigger, then they just moved on to the next metric that conveniently showed that white people were more intelligent.