No one is arguing that drug companies don't have work, and a lot of it, to do developing a promising drug (that is generally what comes out of university research) into a marketable one. Nor is anyone saying that that process is cheap.
However, the amount of money that goes into finding those promising drugs (collectively, including all the failures in those stages) is much greater than the work that drug companies do in testing and developing them (collectively, including failures).
Right or wrong, most of that research is government funded, and then the (monetary) rewards of all that spending generally flow entirely to the drug companies (often with some reward going to the University who hosted the research). So the drug companies wind up with Hughe effective subsidies, and little of the down-side of early drug development or basic research.
