The truth about the drug companies

Bernie Sanders says that the only lobby which wins 98% of the time in the US Senate is the Big Pharma lobby. 

What is big Pharma? 

'Big Pharma' comprises of Huge pharmaceutical companies mainly from US and Europe (Pfizer, johnson and johnson, gsk, eli lilly, Bristol mayers Squibb, Roche, Astrazeneca, Merck and co, Novartis, Bayer, Sanofi etc.) 

What do they do?

These companies are into life saving medicines for cancer, heart diseases, organ rejection, psychological drugs, rare drugs etc these are also called as branded drugs because they are developed by the Pharma Companies themselves by putting in lot of efforts and money into R & D or atleast they say!

Why are prices high? 

One of the main reasons why these companies keep the price of these medicines high is inflated research and development costs.They also unilaterally rise the prices of these medicines without any logic and consultation. In the past 20 to 25 years the cost of some of the life saving medicines has gone up by 1000% no wonder why the Healthcare and medicine in the US is about 17 to 18% of their GDP which amounts to 3 to 3.5 trillion dollars.

(In trillion dollar US Pharma Industry prescription medicine constitutes to around 30 % of the market) 

Is there a Quid pro quo ? 

Big Pharma claims most of the money that is required to develop these medicines goes into research and development, however many studies have shown that this money goes into Advertising and Marketing that to, mainly to the medical community itself which prescribes these drugs to the patients.

To our surprise these Big Pharma Companies also pay some of the continuing education and medical licensing charges of the doctors. In doing so these companies secure the loyalty of doctors who inturn prescribe this medicines to the patients.

(An important thing here to note is that most of the research and development, fundamental understanding of most of the diseases happens in the public labs and universities funded by the tax payers money)

How do they Kill competition? 

These medicines are in no way better than the older medicines. Just to cut out the competition from new generic medicine makers these companies indulge in something called as evergreening of the medicines by acquiring new version to the same old medicine with slight modifications.

The big pharma lobby is so huge that, there are 2 to 3 lobbyists for every senator in the Washington D.C, all these are very well researched and articulated in this book by Marcia Angell, who was the then Chief Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine who has seen all these for decades first hand. 

The good part about this book is, it gives implementable solutions both to the government and to the general public to overcome lobbying, heavy medical insurance premiums making medicine affordable to one and all.