Big Pharma profits low in the US? Please. Their R&D happens wherever talent is cheapest, their tax havens wherever laws are loosest, and their profits—record-breaking year after year—safely deposited wherever shareholders are happiest. If only their medicines were as creative as their accounting.
The real innovation is their business model: socialize the research costs, privatize the profits. Billions in taxpayer dollars fund the basic science, university labs, and early clinical trials that underpin 'breakthrough' drugs. Yet when these public investments strike gold, not a penny in dividends flows back to the public coffers that made it possible. Instead, we pay twice—first through our taxes to develop the drugs, then through world-leading prices to access them. That's not capitalism; that's a publicly-subsidized monopoly.
The real innovation is their business model: socialize the research costs, privatize the profits. Billions in taxpayer dollars fund the basic science, university labs, and early clinical trials that underpin 'breakthrough' drugs. Yet when these public investments strike gold, not a penny in dividends flows back to the public coffers that made it possible. Instead, we pay twice—first through our taxes to develop the drugs, then through world-leading prices to access them. That's not capitalism; that's a publicly-subsidized monopoly.