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The pharmaceutical industry isn't the only place where there's waste and inefficiency and profiteering. That happens in much of the rest of the health care industry.

To start with, pharma was an industry based on innovation, drug discovery.

Getting a traditional pharmaceutical to the market can cost a billion dollars or more. Newer, more tailored and targeted drugs called biologics are even more complex and expensive. Simple economics dictates that companies and venture funds will invest more in products that can generate a sufficient return.

The pharmaceutical industry likes to depict itself as a research-based industry, as the source of innovative drugs. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is their incredible PR and their nerve.

First of all, pharmaceutical costs are the single fastest-growing part of our health care budget.

Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.

We've had a long wrangle with the pharmaceutical industry about parallel imports, and what we were saying is we want to make medicines and drugs as affordable as a possible to what is largely a poor population.

It is very clear that the present system of innovation for medicines is very inefficient and really somewhat corrupt. It benefits shareholders over patients; it produces for the rich markets and not for the poor and does not produce for minority diseases.

If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.

If you destroyed half the pharmaceutical production in the United States, we'd think it's a pretty serious problem. In fact, we'd probably go to war.