It's never enough

 (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

It's never enough. Big Pharma, like insurance companies and the MIC, has this country by the short hairs but you already know that, right?

Pharmaceutical giants rang in the new year by quietly announcing price hikes in the United States on more than 350 drugs — and they continue to insist these price hikes are necessary for innovation. But new research shows that the business model of America’s largest pharmaceutical companies involves far more spending on enriching shareholders and executives than on research and development.

Between 2012 and 2021, the 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development, according to a new study by economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a researcher at Brown University.

But that hasn’t stopped drug companies and their lobbying groups from using the cost of innovation as a key argument in their campaign to keep Medicare from being able to negotiate lower drug prices. The pharmaceutical industry has spent at least $645 million on federal lobbying over the past two years.

But that's not all. Marketing rules vs research as it's all about the money, right?

Prescription drugs are a massive market: Americans spent $329.2 billion on prescription drugs in 2013. That works out to about $1,000 per person in the U.S., as John Oliver pointed out in his show on Sunday night.

Oliver also mentioned that nine out of 10 big pharmaceutical companies spend more on marketing than on research. León Markovitz of Dadaviz found and graphed those figures from healthcare research firm GlobalData in the graphic above The amounts spent on sales and marketing are shown in orange, while the amounts spent on research and development are in blue.

The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.

The profit margins never cease to amaze.

Imagine an industry that generates higher profit margins than any other and is no stranger to multi-billion dollar fines for malpractice.

Throw in widespread accusations of collusion and over-charging, and banking no doubt springs to mind.

In fact, the industry described above is responsible for the development of medicines to save lives and alleviate suffering, not the generation of profit for its own sake.

Pharmaceutical companies have developed the vast majority of medicines known to humankind, but they have profited handsomely from doing so, and not always by legitimate means.

Last year, US giant Pfizer, the world's largest drug company by pharmaceutical revenue, made an eye-watering 42% profit margin. As one industry veteran understandably says: "I wouldn't be able to justify [those kinds of margins]."

Any questions?