Bullshit. Show me where you get this 70% figure from? Are you talking about spending or results? I think you pulled it out of your arse, but would love to know. What I found was, European r&d spending is close to what the USA spends. Individual countries spend more as a percentage of GDP than USA. World wide, USA does not appear to be spending anywhere close to 70% of the total on medical r&d.
* 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?
The Nobel Prize is for basic research. Once you've done the basic research, you're still looking at spending huge amounts of money, on the order of a billion dollars, and spending 15 years bringing it to market. The drug industry is in trouble even as it is, and obviously they would be in worse trouble if they had to sell as cheaply in the US as they do in the rest of the world.
>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.
* 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?