Why don't people get that medical costs are due to the pharmaceutical companies?!?

A lot of the cost comes from the "research" spending done on pharmaceutical companies but here's the fact: Pharmaceutical companies spend the majority of their profits on advertising rather than research. I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I feel that the monopoly that is the pharmaceutical industry is what's the problem in the United States. I'm not opposed to Universal healthcare at all, but I feel that if this problem were addressed, then a lot more problems would be solved with it. For instance, prices of medication in Canada are from anywhere between 1/3 to 1/5 cheaper than prices in the United States...isn't there something wrong with this picture?