One thing most people outside don't recognize is that they pay low prices for drugs BECAUSE the US system has higher prices. Drug developers make their profits to recover their development costs by selling higher priced medicines to the US. They then turn around and sell drugs at a cost plus pricing to the rest of the world.
It is for this very reason that almost every drug developed for worldwide consumption is marketed in the US first. Companies headquartered all over the world, including Australia, will seek FDA approval and sometimes explicitly prevent their drugs/treatments from initially being sold in their home countries.
The US system is not very efficient as you say, and it hardly works as a great model. Without it very few drugs would come to market, as the cost of development, including cost of failure, is only rewarded by the US system.
Consider Ryoncil for example. When it is all said and done, it might have cost Mesoblast a Billion USD to bring the treatment to market. I am not sure how many SR-aGVHD cases there are in Australia per year. However, I would harken a guess that if Mesoblast were to only market Ryoncil in Australia it would not have embarked on that journey as it would never be able to cover the development cost. It is access to the inefficient US system that made it possible.
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