Is your country’s pharmaceutical companies pushing the entire industry forward?
As I read it, your argument seems to be that American healthcare must be more expensive than similar-quality healthcare elsewhere because we're paying higher pharmaceutical prices to fund research. If we accept that premise, shouldn't that mean that: 1. The "medicine" portion of costs increases, causing the total cost to increase 2. Administrative effort, and therefore absolute cost, remains the same (we're paying X% more for drugs, not thinking X% harder about whether a given drug is needed by a given patient) 3. Administrative overhead as a percentage of total cost should be lower given a similar efficiency level, because higher drug prices inflated the divisor (total cost) while having no effect on the dividend (administrative costs)
Does his country’s pharmaceutical industry push the frontier of medicine forward?
Not that is has anything to do with efficiency. If you give 100 to my public healthcare, 94 of that will be used to reimburse health expenses, if you give 100 to US private healthcare, only 86 will be used to reimburse health expenses. That has nothing to do with initial costs.