Hi there. My name's Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, a leading US health

expert sets out why he believes pharmaceutical firms are undermining his country's health system.

In the United States, where we don't have health technology assessment, where we don't have

cost-effectiveness studies, we don't have limits technology assessment where we don't have cost-effectiveness studies,

we don't have limits on what drug companies can charge.

Doctors are trapped in this nexus.

It's almost like being trapped in a spider web of commercially biased information.

Following the money in US healthcare, that's Business Daily from the BBC.

Is something seriously wrong within the US health system? Some doctors reckon it has become

fundamentally broken, pointing to the widening gap in provision between rich and poor, especially since the start of the pandemic.

80% of US hospitals remain under high or extreme stress, we're told, despite a fall in COVID hospitalisations.

So why is it so bad? According to John Abramson, he's a professor at the Harvard Medical School,

it's not really to do with COVID at all.

In a new book, he argues there is a deeper and a lying crisis at play,

stemming from the behavior of the country's major pharmaceutical firms.

If you look at the difference in the age-adjusted mortality rate between Americans and the citizens of other wealthy countries,

you see that about 1,300 excess American deaths are happening daily.

This is pre-pandemic.

Taking more American lives than the COVID pandemic has over the course of the last two years.

So our health is stunningly, drastically inferior to other wealthy countries.

And for this, we're paying an excess 7% of our GDP on health care, which translates into spending

an excess $1.5 trillion a year. I mean, I've seen the stats. It's what, roughly 17, 18% of GDP

...