ABSTRACT
The proportion of the GNP devoted to health care in the United States is quite comparable to the figures seen in other industrialized countries. As already mentioned, expenditures on pharmaceuticals currently contribute only about 8% of the total dollars spent on all health care needs. Although dollar expenditures have continuously risen, psychiatric hospitals have accounted for a decreasing proportion of total health care expenditures since the late 1950s. The research capacity of the pharmaceutical industry constitutes an invaluable national asset. In the last thirty years, this capacity to innovate has produced 90 percent of all new drugs. The process of examining the economics of health care delivery visá-vis pharmaceuticals is made much clearer by a report from Tile and Till: The Revolution in Medical Care. The search for new drugs, therefore, has a unique requirement for step-by-step procedures based, wherever possible, on proven information.
