Europe is one of the primary reasons US drug pricing is so messed up. Many European countries negotiate drug pricing on cost to manufacturer (practically nothing) with a negotiated slim profit margin. Then the drug companies just offload the rest of the R&D cost onto the US consumer. But, almost the entire cost of a drug is in the R&D.
Imagine if the rest of the world only paid for CPUs based on the per unit cost of silicon but none of the fab or engineering cost. So $20 CPUs for the rest of the world and $20k CPUs for the US since the US consumer has to cover the 10s of billions for fab/R&D cost while the rest of the world only pays for the silicon.
That's what happening with drug pricing right now. People _need_ medicine, which is how we got into this mess of drug pricing since it's frowned on to price people out of medicine. But European countries aren't exactly poor struggling post-war economies anymore. They can afford to shoulder more of the R&D cost instead of laughing at the US subsidizing the world.
