Drug companies take their research from the NIH and the Universities. So WE are paying for their R&D. They take the research you and I paid for, make a drug and sell it for humongous prices.

A lot of the price is for marketing, those damned ads on TV that try to get you to ask your doctor for the medication (even though the ad does tell you the side effects are killers), and for extremely well-paid drug reps who make the rounds of doctor's offices selling them on the latest medication that is more expensive but doesn't work as well as the one that went out of patent two years before. You're also paying for expensive trips for doctors to attend conferences at first class resorts where other doctors lecture and the drug reps are trying to sell them on that latest expensive drug.

It's a racket.