Big Pharma

Do you have a source for those two figures you've quoted? Because the last I remember it was suggested that R&D spend is about the same as advertising, still a long way from "poor us, we spend every cent on R&D and now you want to take away our patents" but a lot more than pretty much any other industry.

The idea that all the real work is done "at the universities" may be superficially correct, but it involves a bit of sleight of hand. You've gone from counting how much is spent /by/ the companies to whether work is done /at/ the universities. In practice drug research _at_ universities is heavily funded by these same big pharmaceutical companies. If they decided to cut that spending, you'd see big job losses.

In fact this is a major topic of discussion. If the researchers were funded by government (= higher taxes to pay for it) they'd have no reason to do some of the dubious things they do today to ensure they keep their funding from big pharmaceutical companies. For example, deciding not to publish results from an experiment which shows no difference between an old drug and a new drug. Or changing the measured outcome of a controlled trial after the data is collected, in order to have a positive result rather than an equivocal one.