Pharmaceuticals represent about 10% of healthcare spending for Americans. Inpatient and outpatient comes out to around 52% of annual healthcare costs.[0-1] While there are many issues in the pharmaceutical industry, as a whole I think they get an unnecessarily bad rap. Most of America's healthcare problems are self inflicted. There are a lot of things that need to be adjusted in order to let markets run effectively.
The US is actually middle-of-the-pack compared to other OECD countries in terms of rx drug spend as a percent of total healthcare costs. So while drugs are more expensive in the US, that's mostly just due to overall higher US healthcare costs, not because there's anything special about pharma in the US.
I know other countries spend more than the US on primary / preventative care (though dont have a source offhand); would be interested to know whether hospital spend as % of national HC spend is higher in the US (ive seen data suggesting that cost of a hospital bed for one night in the US is significantly higher than other OECD countries, but don't recall by how much)
[0]: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta... [1]: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...