No matter the metric, drug prices in the United States are extreme. Many drugs cost more than $120,000 a year. A few are even closing in on $1 million. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that Americans spent more than $460 billion on drugs—16.7 percent of total health-care spending—in 2016, the last year for which there are definitive data. On average, citizens of other rich countries spend 56 percent of what Americans spend on the exact same drug.

Read: The 7 most revealing moments from a major drug-pricing hearing

Excessive drug prices are the single biggest category of health-care overspending in the United States compared with Europe, well beyond high administrative costs or excessive use of CT and MRI scans. And unlike almost every other product, drug prices continue to rapidly rise over time. HHS estimates that over the next decade, drug prices will rise 6.3 percent each year, while other health-care costs will rise 5.5 percent. Basic economic principles suggest that drug prices should be going down, not up: For most drugs, manufacturing volumes are increasing, and little new research is being conducted on those already on the market.

Reducing these high drug prices has become a major political concern—and a rare bipartisan cause for Democrats and Republicans to rally around, albeit with disagreement about how to actually get it done . In his State of the Union address last month, President Donald Trump called the price discrepancy between the United States and other countries “unacceptable” and “unfair,” and vowed to “stop it fast.” In a Senate Finance Committee hearing on drug pricing a few weeks later, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon compared the way the drugmaker AbbVie protects the exclusivity of one of its drugs to the way Gollum protects his ring.

Yet every time Congress debates doing something about drug prices, the industry—and the advocacy groups it funds—vociferously returns to the point that lower prices will thwart innovative research. The fear of missing a cure for Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease or depression contributes to stalling reform. But there are many reasons to question the widely held notion that high drug prices and innovative research are inextricably linked.

The most telling data on a disconnect between drug prices and research costs has received almost no public attention. Peter Bach, a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and his colleagues compared prices of the top 20 best-selling drugs in the United States to the prices in Europe and Canada. They found that the cumulative revenue from the price difference on just these 20 drugs more than covers all the drug research and development costs conducted by the 15 drug companies that make those drugs—and then some

To be more precise, after accounting for the costs of all research—about $80 billion a year—drug companies had $40 billion more from the top 20 drugs alone, all of which went straight to profits, not research. More excess profit comes from the next 100 or 200 brand-name drugs.