It's crucial to keep in mind that the hundreds of millions of dollars now spent on prescription drug advertisements are ultimately paid for by consumers in the form a higher drug prices.
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Every night I watch the nightly news. It's funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Virtually every ad is a drug ad. They get their say every night on the nightly news through advertising.
Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.
In every country except - industrial country except the United States, the government uses its massive purchasing power to negotiate drug prices. That's one of the reasons prices are so much higher in the United States than in other countries.
Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.
It is very likely that many firms spend more on advertising than, for their own best interests, they should.
If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn't have to advertise them.
America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs.
If Americans could legally access prescription drugs outside the United States, then drug companies would be forced to re-evaluate their pricing strategy.
I'd never have guessed that, six years after Medicare introduced a drug benefit, it would still be forbidden to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. Health reform might fix that, but it probably won't.
While American taxes pay for much of the research and development that goes into creating the new, life-saving drugs, American consumers continue to subsidize the cost of the drugs for consumers across the world.
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