All of these countries have different economies, different tax laws, different legal systems (both in the formal sense, and in terms of "legal culture"), different medical systems outside of insurance/payment (again both in formal senses of laws, regulations, and formal ethical principles, and in terms of "culture", informal norms, and tendencies in practice), different accident rates, different eating habits, different exercise habits, different social welfare systems, different levels of crime and violence, different genetics (yes the US has a lot of immigrants, and some other the other countries do to, but I believe genetics is still a factor), different levels of various environmental concerns, different levels of overall wealth, different patterns of wealth distribution, different social and cultural norms and habits outside these areas...
And, parenthetically, the big pharma companies headquartered in Switzerland are still doing just fine profit-wise, thank-you-very-much.
The issue is not "can drug companies in other nations be profitable, or even very profitable, but where do these profits come from. A disproportionate percentage of the profits come from the American market. |
