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Originally Posted by loquitur
There's also the free-riding aspect of other countries' health care systems. Many of them (yes, Canada included) keep costs low by, in effect, shifting R&D costs to the US.
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Got anything to support that claim? The US pharma market was, in 2006 $252 billion in sales, more than 40 percent of the entire, $605 billion world market.
The pharmaceuticals business is the most profitable of major industries. Companies doing business in the US, employ more than 90,000 "detailers" to call on 120,000 issuers of prescription drugs, US physicians.
I find no data to support your contention that R&D budgets, compared to what is spent on marketing, just in the US, is of major consequence. I've found your "shifting R&D costs argument", pushed by conservative talkshow hosts Medved and Prager, but I see no data to support it. What do you think it costs to keep an army of "detailers", that size....the most prolific prescription writers are reported to have 65 of these people a week at their doors...1300 visits in a 200 day year, in the field? The compensation for these 90,000, plus expenses, plus the lunch they bring in daily to the staffs of care providers offices, plus the packaging, product, and distribution costs of the drug samples that they drop off on their office calls....none of those costs are related to the TV, print, internet, and promotional "doo dad" media blitz costs incurred by big pharma to inform us about their products.
I submit that your notion of R&D cost "shifting", is a shift of profits to marketing, and not into R&D, and that using the notion is the product of a "K" street lobbyist /republican politician misinformation, "Op", a smokescreen to dissuade growing drug purchases from Mexico and Canada, that cut (so far..) inconsequentially into Pharma profits that would otherwise be spent on marketing, not on R&D.
If there is such a great concern about activities drawing money out of R&D, why not support legislation to limit some of the marketing done by Pharma, putting them all on an even keel? Could it be because the advertising industries political influence is as great or greater, than big phrama's?
Musn't let anything interfere with locking the consumer into a restricted source to purchase medicine, that will bleed him dry, one at a time, with the resulting least political consequence, than to choose to diminish in any way, the big money flowing to the largest, best organized, and most powerful political lobbies, is there?