Can we regulate spending from pharmaceutical manufacturers? Should we?

Great Debates
1

When I am watching television, and I see the myriad of advertisements for prescription drugs that are only available if a doctor says you should take them, yet they are aimed to consumers (not doctors) it reminds me that pharmaceutical companies in America spend a disproportionate amount of money on marketing compared to spending on research.

It seems reprehensible to me that companies would spend millions of dollars on advertising and trinkets while there are still so many diseases, ailments and afflictions that can be cured.

I often wonder if Jonas Salk would have ever found a cure for Polio if he worked within the parameters of modern-day medicinal research. If he did manage it, it would have cost thousands of dollars a dose for the first two years, doubtlessly.

I realize I am conflating a few different issues here, but the fact remains that drug manufacturers can do things a lot differently and if they did, it would make things better for the nation as a whole.

Since the industry has apparently no desire to self-regulate, I don’t think it would be hard to tell those companies that they have some rules that they have to deal with.

An easy one would be simply that they not direct advertisements or marketing dollars for prescription-only medication to consumers. Consumers shouldn’t be telling doctors what medications they need, it should be the other way around. Let them market to the doctors all they want, but stop wasting money on people who, even if they want your medication, can easily be told by a doctor that they shouldn’t take it.

Another thing would be that drug companies would have to devote a certain percentage of their spending on research and development and that it has to be higher than marketing.

The US healthcare system is a huge mess, but I think this would be a good start in making some real change. The question of course, is it is legal?

I ask - how can it not be when the government already regulates other industries (I’m looking at you, tobacco)?

I know some Libertarian-leaning folks will decry this, but I would welcome their solutions to this problem, assuming they feel that there is a problem…

2

What makes you think that are not regulated? You just want to add more regulation based on a pet peeve of yours.

You cannot force companies to do research. Well, you can, but do you really think you’re going to get good research done that way? The companies obviously see advertising as a good ROI, which means they will have more money to do more research. It’s unclear to me that forbidding them to advertise is going to make anything better. What it means is, people have less information than they had before.

Besides, companies are not set up in order to operate the way you want them to operate. You get to set up your own company for that. And drug companies are set up to make money. Just like every other company. If you want nationalize the drug research effort, come out and say it and justify it. As it is, you’re just trying a back door approach to get that end.

3

Do you have a cite that they spend a disproportionate amount on marketing compared to research.

I’m one of the people that would be in the pharma industry’s marketing budget and my income (my business’s income anyway) has gone down considerably because people keep making this claim, yet the last time I looked at a random drug company’s financials it seemed to be totally unfounded.

4

Here you go…

5

Here’s the peer-reviewed article, if you prefer that:

6

I was unaware that making healthcare and drugs better was a “pet peeve” of mine and not something we as a society should strive for.

Also, according to Wiki, the regulations that exist are about truth in advertising, not limiting it.

True, but why can’t we force companies to limit advertising? We did that to tobacco.

7

Should we/can we: yes. Will we chose to: no.

Medicine should never be a business, the profit motive in that context is monstrous, similar to private prisons, private police, private weapons manufacturers ect. It’s life and death stuff that as a result of market mechanisms evolves into pure evil.

If we work hard to maintain and build a society it should at least not be a engine of evil if we are not ourselves evil.

8

This:

is a pet peeve. But be that as it may, you haven’t shown how eliminating advertising will make healthcare and drugs better. You have only stated that you believe it would.

It was a matter of public heath, backed up by tons of scientific evidence. What do you have comparable about the effects of advertising drugs on public health?

9

I just read that one (the first one, haven’t looked at the second one) before you posted it. A LOT have changed in the last 7 years. A ton of drug reps have lost their jobs in the past few years. The Sunshine Act (I think that’s what it’s called) went into effect last year IIRC, a lot of hospitals don’t allow drug reps cater lunches in. Some don’t even allow their staff (any of the stuff, even the maintenance crew down in the basement) to have anything at all with an outside company logo on it. The amount I used to do for drug reps went down by something like 30% from 2010 to 2011.

Now, here’s the thing about that. People complain about how expensive their drugs are but they don’t see all the millions/billions of dollars the company lays out in R&D, lawsuits, patents, etc all they see is one of my employees walking in pushing a cart full of food into the backroom and they snarl at him and say “THAT’s why my drugs cost me a thousand dollars a month”. I think a lot of the changes we’re seeing, cutting back on lunches, taking the doctors down to Pebble Beach for the week, getting rid of the pens, hospitals kicking on the reps are ways of acting like they’re making big changes. They’re getting rid of the visible part of the spending. It wasn’t that long ago when a drug rep would take an entire office and their spouses out to dinner at a hundred dollar a plate restaurant or send the doctors down to Florida to go golfing. That slowly got changed to staff only at the restaurant, leave your spouses at home, then it was doctors only, then we’ll bring the food in, then they started needing signature cards because the nurses would tell the reps the have 45 people there when there were really only 25. Now some companies will only allow a rep to bring a lunch if there’s going to be at least 4 doctors (or PAs). Go over budget, get raked over the coals.
I don’t know what their marketing budget looked like 15 or 10 years ago, but I’m curious if it was that much higher or if it was just directed in more conspicuous places. (I’m also not sure what I’m arguing for, I think I’m just explaining what I know).

10

Nonsense. Is private agriculture evil? It’s life and death “stuff”.

Besides, private drug research does not preclude public sector drug research. What I would call “evil” is the idea that you forbid someone from selling the fruits of his labor for a profit.

11

Why would spending millions of dollars on advertising and trinkets imply that they aren’t working on other drugs? ISTM that they’re likely using those millions of advertising dollars because the ROI is worth it, that’ll give them the cash to invest in other research. More advertising, more drugs sold, more research.

It’s like saying that since there’s a commercial on TV for the iPhone 5 with Siri that Apple isn’t working on any new products.

There’s a separate team for R&D and advertising. It’s not that it’s one guy and if he’s making commercials he’s too busy to cure AIDS.

12

In many cases it is actually, try looking it up. The health or lack of it of their consumers is none of their concern, only producing as much sellable material as possible. Pesticides, dangerous genetic manipulations(such as genetically engineered pesticide genes that grow throughout the plant), short-sighted farming practices that destroy the land and poison the local water supply (petro-fertilizers and pesticides) massive propaganda campaigns to hide their abuses, buy politicians, secure government contracts to feed schoolchildren poisons, efforts to block any research or overwhelm it with fake research to prevent people from understanding what’s going on ect ect.

Thanks for making my case for me though.

13

And your case is that agriculture should be nationalized and run by the government? The last two times that was tried, about 60M people died. But it’s private agriculture that is “evil”. Quite a case you got there, amigo!

14

Sure because those examples port really well… Food is a national security issue, health is a national security issue. IF not nationalized then regulated into transparency and non-evil behavior. The problem is, our regulatory system is run by the regulated, but I suppose for anything to get better the end mechanism isn’t all that important, it’s that the people get the power and media away from corporations.

15

Except no one has demonstrated that for-profit drug research is evil. The most we’ve see is that some people find advertising distasteful.

16

I think the thought is that it drive the cost up for the end-user* and that it forces (or causes) drug companies to create drugs for things that more people are going to use. That is, why bother creating a pill for a disease that kills 1 out of 10,000 people and the pills sell for $0.50 a piece when they could create a pill for something that kills no one, but 1 in 100 people will take it and each pill will cost $1.00 (making drugs and then finding a problem to market them too and all that).
I’m not saying I agree with this, I’m just saying I believe what people think is the issue.

*I don’t know that this is the case, but I’ve always felt that the high cost of drugs/doctors/all things medical is, at least in part, due to insurance. If there was never any such thing as insurance, I wonder if medical costs would have skyrocketed they way it did. The fact that one person pays premiums and never uses their insurance allows another person to pay a very high price for drugs. That’s all well and good, but after a few rounds of inflation it gets out of hand and and Joe Schmo needs some Singulair but has no insurance, he’s out $150 a month. On top of that, the high costs of health care are now getting so high we’ve gone to HDHC plans where the employee/subscriber, in addition to a portion of the premium foots the first several thousand dollars of his or her own health care instead of just a simple co-pay.

17

If public funding of drug research is the ideal, then private research does nothing to prohibit that. At worst, it adds to the “ideal”.

18

HEY GUYS!!! Here’s an idea!!!

Let’s punish the companies that specialize in developing these life-saving drugs by letting the people who specialize in being offended and grousing on the internet tell the drug-developing companies what they can and cannot do with the money they make by developing these drugs!

I’m really good at bitching and moaning online. So that’s what I’ll do. Everybody else is good at developing things I need, like faster cars and better medicine, so they’ll do that. Then, we’ll trade. And if the people who develop things I need say, “Gosh, all stocked up on internet complaining, sorry,” I’ll just demand that the government give me money, 'cause otherwise life’s not fair. Everybody wins!

I guess we do have to be careful that these drug-developers and car-builders might say: Hey, maybe I’ll try my hand at idle whining, cause that seems a lot easier than developing drugs and building cars … but, well … we’ll just tell them they can’t do that, I guess. LOL!!

19

Remember, if you’re not part of the solution, demanding that the government make other people be part of the solution is basically just as good!

20

Again, I disagree, and the only reason you would even bring it up is to either a) minimize the problem or b) claim that there isn’t a problem. Which is it?

It’s also apparently a pet peeve of Obama:

In fact, he is so peeved, he alloted $1 billion for this initiative.

The drug companies will either sit on their profits, unable to spend them on advertising, or they will use it in other areas. They might do the former for a while but as soon as everything they make is available in generics, they will kind of be forced to do some research in order to stay relevant. If they do not, other companies who do spend money on research will be the ones to come up with innovations in treatments.

Already without such restrictions, Drug R&D spending fell in 2010, and heading lower (Reuters).

So the government is using our tax dollars to help research and develop drugs for an industry that is already profiting hands over fist and also cutting their own budgets for R&D.

Seems that the decision to curtail superfluous advertising as a condition for those companies to accept these subsidies is a pretty fair deal.