From Faith in Healthcare (https://faithinhealthcare.org):
Public Citizen last week released an important overview of the pharmaceutical industry, which includes such insights as:
The Industry is Huge: “The global market for pharmaceuticals reached $1.2 trillion in 2018. Just one product—AbbVie’s Humira—had almost the same amount of sales that year as Southwest Airlines.”
The Industry is Taxpayer-Subsidized: “At its core, the brand-name business model is simple. The pharmaceutical industry uses government-funded research to help develop products that are protected by government-granted monopolies to sell to the government and other purchasers for exorbitant profits.”
The Industry is Ridiculously Profitable: “Prescription drugs are not expensive because they are costly to produce, or because of R&D investments. A recent analysis found that prescription drug corporations receive 163 percent of their global research and development costs from just the revenue generated by overcharging Americans for prescription drugs compared to citizens of other countries . . . Retail prescription drug spending, on a per capita basis, has nearly quadrupled since 1990, increasing from $266 to $1025
The Industry’s Products are Usually Not Innovative: “Overly broad U.S. government patent standards and interpretations enable drug corporations to construct “thickets” of patents around their product and engage in patent evergreening to prevent generic competition. Between 2005 and 2015, over 75 percent of drugs associated with new patents were already on the market, meaning most pharmaceutical patents support older medicines rather than groundbreaking new ones.”
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