Of course, how to deal with high prices of drugs, is an increasingly important issue but that is not my point here. I am merely questioning the significance of that 8%. To a certain extent it is misleading because the pharmaceutical industry that actually invests in R&D, belongs to the sector that spends most in innovation compared to other businesses. That reinvestment percentage is more or less fixed. John LaMattina recently showed that with decreasing sales of some companies, also the investment in R&D went down and vice versa (http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2015/04/01/has-lack-of-revenue-growth-stunted-pharma-rd-investments/. The top 15 companies continued to invest approximately 15% of revenues back in research. In that sense, the good news is that with higher revenues also more money is available to find new drugs. I do agree though that we need to question the fairness of current drug prices (particularly in the US).

But that 8% reinvestment number is meaningless in my view as long as you include sales of generic drugs in the denominator.