Of course there is plenty of good medical stuff coming from many countries other than the USA. The market for medical care world wide is way larger outside the USA too. Finally, much medical research is multi national and collaborative.
I wish more people would acknowledge this reality. I like biomedical technology advancement. Most of it is developed in the US because it is the one of the few countries that can absorb the cost of the R&D. If the US stops doing it, who is going to pick it up? There is ample evidence that the answer is "a little bit in Asia and nowhere else". That should be frightening to people. Biomedical R&D is important.
Ignore for the moment that the US healthcare system is a wreck. The fact remains that the majority of biomedical advances come out of the US because it is the only country where people absorb the R&D cost. If Europe was pulling its weight with biomedical R&D it would be one thing but in practice it is producing so little in that regard that it is kind of shameful. If we eliminate US biomedical R&D by eliminating their ability to recover costs, who picks up the slack? There are no easy answers.
* 2011 Nobel prize for medicine went to an international crew (2 from europe, 1 USA)
* 2010 Nobel prize for medicine went to a British man.
* 2009 2 women from the USA, and one man from UK.
* 2008 1 german man, 1 french woman, 1 french man.
Anyway, medical care isn't just about what drugs multi national companies produce (with much funding from Asia and actual research done in Asia and sales done in USA+worldwide). It includes things like reducing obesity, stopping people smoking in bars, and providing good medical care for all people - which reduces sickness spreading. It does take research, and development to figure these things out and implement them on a social level successfully. Many of these things are classed as social science, and not included in R&D in many places. They can't even get R&D funding for this stuff in some places because it is not real science apparently.
Tax credits for r&d also distort the real costs. The UK gives 225% r&d tax credits, and Australia gives 175% tax credits of the cost now(USA has them too, but lower). This means you make money purely from just doing the R&D without worrying about the results.
btw, the USA is massively in debt, and over 22% of US companies being foreign controlled. So even if the US companies were contributing that much R&D, shouldn't that proportion be attributed somewhat to other countries? With all the funding into the USA also coming from other countries, shouldn't some of that be counted towards the other countries? Shouldn't the fact that lots of the workers in R&D labs for US companies have been outsourced to other countries count towards those countries?
>So even if the US companies were contributing that much R&D, shouldn't that proportion be attributed somewhat to other countries?
No, at least not for that reason. The important thing is not where the innovator is located, but what market they target.
Inasmuch as it is possible for companies of this size to be from any one particularly country, large American pharmaceutical companies spent $27bn on R&D in 2009, while European ones spent €28.5bn (i.e. 40% more at today's exchange rate.)
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pharmaceutical_companie...
Specifically, consider Bayer. This is listed as a German pharmaceutical company. Bayer reports to have 37,000 employees, however 16,000 of thema are in the USA. (http://www.bayerpharma.com/en/company/index.php, http://www.bayer.com/en/north-america.aspx).
Better statistics are provided elsewhere in wiki, for instance US R&D expenditure dwarfs that of any other country. It is also about 33% higher than that of the combined total of EU countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_a...
This is irrelevant to the claim I was debunking.
True, the great grand-parent post appears to be conflating where the research was done with the nationality of the company funding the research, and I admit that I only responded to one half of the argument, but that was purely because it was the easiest to fact-check. That doesn't make the other half of the argument true.
Specifically, consider Bayer. This is listed as a German pharmaceutical company.
"American" pharmaceutical companies also have employees in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
Better statistics are provided elsewhere in wiki, for instance US R&D expenditure dwarfs that of any other country.
Including, say, military and aerospace R&D with healthcare R&D to try and make a point about just healthcare is clearly ridiculous.