If it's so good at it, why does it always need government funding?
(As testified before a congressional committee by an FDA official, his response to the question of "how many drugs receive government research funding?" was "all of them.")
Where is the "always" coming from? Check actual clinical trials registries and you will see that most clinical trials are not funded by the government.
That's a very biased way of looking at things, because you don't seem to understand how the research is organized in the first place.
The industry works all the time with academics. Academics do the fundamental science labor, which means identifying new targets, new pathways, new proteins and so on. This kind of research is indeed usually funded by a combination of public and private grants. Most of that research leads to nothing in the end, by the way - not everything they produce is picked up by the pharma industry, because most of what they produce fails to give results - that's the inherent property of doing fundamental research.
Then the industry purchases/licenses (and patents) what is considered to have the largest commercial potential - then pre-clinical, phase 1 up to phase 3 are mostly funded by the pharma industry. This is also where the bulk of the cost is. A clinical trial in phase 3 can costs in the dozens of millions of dollars, and there's always a solid chance that it fails to meet its endpoints so the risk is far from nil.
Based on the NIH numbers, the funding for research (i.e. grants) is about 45 billions annually. At the same time, the pharma industry spends 87 billions per year on R&D, which is about twice more.
(As testified before a congressional committee by an FDA official, his response to the question of "how many drugs receive government research funding?" was "all of them.")