[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
Yeah, profits sure are my first concern, considering that cancer drugs saved my father’s life. And goodness knows if my grandmother would have lived to be 88 years old without her diabetes pills. And then there’s the time my daughter had a bad infection and it went away in 3 days with some antibiotics. And the painkillers I was prescribed sure helped me out when I was immobilized with back pain. And it certainly was nice not to have to worry about contracting polio, small pox, measles, mumps, or rubella thanks to the vaccinces I was lucky enough to get as a kid. And was I ever glad to have baby formula to feed my kids when I couldn’t produce enough milk to fill them up.
Oh, yeah…those pharma companies & their investors are evil all right.
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Oh, I got nothing against the life saving meds that some pharmaceutical manufacturers make and I’m not even against them turning a profit. I’m just against obscene profits, price fixing, and the general unethical nature of Big Pharma in the name of capitalism. They are marketing (aka pushing) their drugs for profit. It doesn’t sit well with me and I think people are being overmedicated because of it.
I just saw last week some pharmaceutical company was fined by the FDA or something because they were trying to fix the market and taking doctors on lavish “drug conference” junkets to ensure that they marketed and prescribed their drugs.
[QUOTE=Tim Stoddard]
Drug companies say that they must charge high prices to cover their huge investments in research and development (R&D) and to ensure a steady stream of innovative medicines. Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at the College of Arts and Sciences and a consultant to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, supports high prices for prescription drugs for this reason. “The reality is that this is a highly risky business,” he says, “and it’s very expensive for drug companies to bring a product to market.” In a recent Boston Globe op-ed piece, Kotlikoff argues that “to develop each of the high-priced drugs that we buy, the pharmaceutical companies pay, on average, almost $1 billion. Like it or not, the drug companies need to recoup these costs, and we need to let them. If we don’t, we’ll be doing a grave disservice to ourselves in limiting the prospects of new cures for painful and often life-threatening diseases.”
A growing number of Americans are questioning that rationale, though, and Angell is leading the charge. Her book reveals that drug companies spend far less on R&D than they would have us believe. “Research and development is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies,” she says. “They spend over twice as much on marketing and administration, and they actually make more in profits than they spend on R&D.” In 2002 the top ten drug companies spent 14 percent of sales on R&D, but 31 percent on marketing and administration.
“You can’t call an industry risky when it has consistently been the most profitable in the United States for over two decades,” she says, noting that last year big pharma fell from first place to third. “As long as they have those immense profits left at the end of the year, they are doing better than fine.”
The enormous profits drug companies make on blockbuster drugs are supposed to encourage innovation. But Angell says big pharma is hardly innovative. “The Food and Drug Administration classifies new drugs according to whether they are likely to offer anything better than drugs already on the market,” she explains. “In the past six years, of the 487 drugs that entered the market, 379 — 78 percent — were considered no better than older drugs. And most of those were not even new compounds, just old ones in new combinations or formulations.”
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From Bostonia