Drugs

Have you ever noticed that there are only ever three topics that people discuss during election years: education, healthcare, and taxes? This year we can add war to the mix, but on the whole these three topics dominate the discourse. In the realm of healthcare falls the recently-popular prescription drug cost debate. We all know that drugs are overpriced, in many cases outrageously so. The question Why? isn’t much addressed by the politicians, but the New Yorker’s Critic At Large, Malcom Gladwell, has taken a stab at the topic.

Gladwell takes the example of heartburn treatments Prilosec and Nexium to illustrate a very interesting point about the strategy of drug companies to boost profits and retain control of markets for one drug family or another. Prilosec was a brilliantly effective medication o treat heartburn and acid reflux, but it’s patent was running out. AstraZeneca, the maker of the drug, decided to change slightly in order to extend its patent.

The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge預nd the extraordinary profits they enjoy傭y arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines is risky and expensive. But Nexium is little more than a repackaged version of an old medicine. And the hundred and twenty dollars a month that AstraZeneca charges isn稚 to recoup the costs of risky research and development; the costs were for a series of clinical trials that told us nothing we needed to know, and a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign selling the solution to a problem we壇 already solved.

Basically, the drug companies are turning out old drugs in new clothes, thus saving themselves huge expense and reaping massive profits. I’m all for making a profit. The problem is that we aren’t really getting more bang for our buck when this kind of thing goes on. Not only that, but we get less pharmaceutical innovation because there is no incentive to explore as many new drugs when the old ones can simply be repackaged and re-marketed at least twice, maybe more. Instead of developing new classes of antibiotics and other essential drugs, companies are focused solely on “me too” drugs like Viagra and Prilosec.

Unfortunately I don’t know what government’s role in the marketplace should be or how it can react to encourage innovation and help create more affordable prescription drugs. Maybe there is no legislative solution, as there often isn’t, and it is a matter of publicizing the methods of the drug industry.