For brand-name drugs, the average U.S. manufacturer gross prescription drug price is 4.2 times as high as the average in the other seven rich countries.

For all drugs, the average U.S. price is 2.8 times as high.

But for generic drugs, the average U.S. price is 33% lower.

"Generic drug competition in the United States is generally robust, with rapid entry and price declines following patent expiration," Kyle says. "The high prices paid by U.S. consumers during the limited patent term are at least somewhat offset by the benefits of low prices later on."

The big picture: Kyle argues that, overall, in the context of the U.S. economy and U.S. health care system, U.S. prescription drug prices are not necessarily very high and are not responsible for the fact that health care costs much more in the United States than in other rich countries.

"Despite the attention drug prices receive, pharmaceuticals do not seem to be a major driver of health care cost increases overall, in the United States or other high-income countries," Kyle adds.

Drug costs v. GDP: The United States spends about 18% of its gross domestic product, or national income, on all forms of health care, compared with a typical level of about 11% to 12% of GDP in the other rich countries in Kyle's analysis.

But prescription drugs account for more than 12% of health care spending in the other rich countries and less than 10% of health care spending in the United States, Kyle reports.

Another consideration is that GDP is higher than in most other rich countries, and that may make the value of a "statistical life" higher in the United States than in those other countries, she says.

"Cost-effectiveness thresholds based on the value of a statistical life will naturally allow for a higher U.S. price than in Germany, for example," Kyle says.

Another issue is that, in some cases, prescription drugs compete for patient dollars with surgery or other forms of care.

Pharmaceutical companies may be able to get away with charging more for some brand-name drugs in the United States partly because the surgeries the patients would get if they did not take the drugs cost a lot more in the United States, Kyle says.

If the price for a U.S. drug is high because the cost of the surgery a patient would get in place of the drug is high, "interventions in the market for one input may introduce unexpected distortions," Kyle warns.

Kyle's arguments are similar to those some international prescription drug market players have made about the difficulty of comparing how much drugs in different countries cost.

Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, the chief executive officer of Novo Nordisk — the maker of the Wegovy GLP-1 agonist weight-loss drug — testified at a U.S. Senate hearing in September that the company gets less revenue from selling insulin to a patient in the United States than from selling insulin to patients in many markets in Europe.