This is an interesting topic. On the one hand yes, the US does do a lot of the R&D for the medical industry that ultimately gets used by Europe's nationalized healthcare systems, and it sucks that the people who manufacture those products in the US pay more for them than they do in the EU.
On the other hand, the EU historically* had a far less stringent regulatory approval system for medicine and medical devices. The end result of this was that medicine and medical devices would often get sold in the EU first, allowing a manufacturer to recoup some investment cost and get some real-world experience with the product before going through the lengthy and costly FDA clearance/approval process (that lengthy and costly FDA process being a main reason why medicine and medical devices are so expensive in the US).
So I suppose you could say there was a bit of a symbiotic relationship.
* A couple years ago the EU implemented a new regulatory structure which makes the approval process much more rigorous and similar to the FDA's process. I left the industry before it went into effect, so I'm not that familiar with it. My understanding is it's still easier to get an EU approval than an FDA approval, but it'll be interesting to see what effect these new regulations have on that symbiotic relationship.
Beyond that, it would be entirely possible for baby formula to be manufactured in the US for sale in the EU, and it be illegal to instead sell that formula in the US.
My experience was on the medical device side, and we had a single assembly line that manufactured devices for EU clinical, US clinical, and Research (basically anyone who wanted one who wasn't a hospital). We started running out of certain parts used on the US clinical product, but it would have been a BIG FUCKING SCANDAL if we had simply shipped the US customer an EU device even though they were basically the same thing.
This is an interesting topic. On the one hand yes, the US does do a lot of the R&D for the medical industry that ultimately gets used by Europe's nationalized healthcare systems, and it sucks that the people who manufacture those products in the US pay more for them than they do in the EU.
On the other hand, the EU historically* had a far less stringent regulatory approval system for medicine and medical devices. The end result of this was that medicine and medical devices would often get sold in the EU first, allowing a manufacturer to recoup some investment cost and get some real-world experience with the product before going through the lengthy and costly FDA clearance/approval process (that lengthy and costly FDA process being a main reason why medicine and medical devices are so expensive in the US).
So I suppose you could say there was a bit of a symbiotic relationship.
* A couple years ago the EU implemented a new regulatory structure which makes the approval process much more rigorous and similar to the FDA's process. I left the industry before it went into effect, so I'm not that familiar with it. My understanding is it's still easier to get an EU approval than an FDA approval, but it'll be interesting to see what effect these new regulations have on that symbiotic relationship.
Yeah, never forget during the baby formula shortage where stock from EU countries that was perfectly safe wasn't allowed to be sold in America.
Beyond that, it would be entirely possible for baby formula to be manufactured in the US for sale in the EU, and it be illegal to instead sell that formula in the US.
My experience was on the medical device side, and we had a single assembly line that manufactured devices for EU clinical, US clinical, and Research (basically anyone who wanted one who wasn't a hospital). We started running out of certain parts used on the US clinical product, but it would have been a BIG FUCKING SCANDAL if we had simply shipped the US customer an EU device even though they were basically the same thing.