For future reference

I just wanted to save this for future arguments: Dean Baker provides numbers to back up an important fact.

Just to fill in some numbers here, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the country is projected to spend almost $240 billion on prescription drugs this year. If these drugs were sold as generics, the savings would be around $170 billion. Pharma claims that it does about $40 billion in research. According to the FDA and Pharma's own data, about two-thirds of this research goes to developing copycat drugs. This means that we pay an extra $170 billion for our drugs, in order to finance about $14 billion in research into breakthrough drugs.