United States development spending

The American Heart Association estimates that the United States will spend close to 39 billion in 2010 to treat over five million Americans suffering from heart failure. Advances in ryanodine receptor (RyR2)/calcium release channel research have led to the development of novel compounds targeting RyR2 for treating heart failure and for preventing lethal arrhythmias. 

The major licensee in the United States, after spending a great deal of time and effort on technical research and development and marketing research, was unable to obtain Food and Drug Administration clearance for its contemplated products and discontinued its in-... 

In 1993, the United States medical device industry employed 282,000 people, averaging a growth rate of about 4% since 1975. Research and development spending in this industry outpaced that in virtually every other industry. Over 7% of sales were spent on research and development in 1993, amounting to a Httle less than 3 bHHon. This rate reflects both the rapid rate of innovation and short product life-cycle. Medical devices become obsolete far more rapidly than pharmaceuticals (qv), forcing companies continuously to be innovative. 

Because this literature has become so vast and has morphed in so many different ways, we focus on a subset. Specifically, we review three types of studies. First, we review evidence based on comparisons of spending and outcomes across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Second, we describe a number of studies focusing on specific countries (namely, the United States and Canada). These studies have examined the impact of pharmaceutical spending levels on health outcomes using variation across administrative units and over time within individual countries. Finally, we introduce the growing literature examining the value of pharmaceuticals relative to specific disease areas. 

A "fuel or food" debate is also in progress, because biofuels are made from agricultural products and therefore they drive up food prices. Today 33 nations are at risk of social unrest because of the rise in food prices (most of their families spend 75%-80% of their income on food). In the United States, a fifth of the corn crop is used to brew ethanol and as more com is planted shortages develop in other produce, such as soybeans. 

States would spend 160 billion per year on pollution control. In 1996 Ben Lieberman, an environmental research associate with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, estimated that in the United States the cost of the phaseout of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in accordance with the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer could reach 100 billion over the next ten years. Indeed chemical manufacturers had to develop eco-friendly substitutes such as hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) and hydro-fluorocarbon (HFC), which are more costly to make, and hundreds of millions of pieces of air-conditioning and refrigeration equipment using CFCs had to be discarded. 

Society, comprising patients, physicians, taxpayers, investors, and government, expects more from the industry when it purchases its products at the rate of 300 billion per annum in the United States alone. The companies in turn spend 49.3 billion of this revenue on research and development (R D). On top of this, U.S. society currently spends 28 billion through funding of research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This investment should, and does, benefit Pharma directly. 

Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on research and development programs each year in an effort to discover and develop innovative new medicines. As such, protection of these novel drugs and new technology developed during the research process from outside competitors is of paramount importance. The patent laws of the United States provide a mechanism by which research-based pharmaceutical... 

Employment policy spending as a percentage of GDP is quite modest in the United States compared to other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Among 22 OECD countries in 1992, only Japan had a lower share of GDP devoted to employment policy. In 1992 the Japanese unemployment rate... 

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