This was a great post!  I hung on every word, because it is the climate we are living in!  

Bill, do you know how much R&D would cost for the development of Zyvox?  When my husband worked for a non profit called Heart Rhythm Foundation, he had a meeting with Sanofi-Adventis.  They told them, the average cost from the lab to getting a drug through the FDA pipeline was between 3-4 Billion $.  And we also have to remember that Pharma invests millions in products that never make it to market. Is there a site that offers this type of info?

While I wholeheartedly agree with your comments, I'm just curious to see how much it costs for a new drug and how soon they re-coop their investment. 

While I was writing The Scoop on Cheap Test Strips, the one thing I was amazed by was the increase in cost from my local Rite Aid.  When I asked the pharmacist why strips were so expensive, she said insurance. Insurance companies pays the pharmacy once a month they have to increase the cost of the strips to cover what is outstanding.  

The whole system is a mess!

Jenny Ruhl

9/ 6/09 2:42pm

The cost to develop drugs is probably overstated and may include a lot of marketing expense. Even if it isn't, the company makes billions out of one years' worth of sales.

Pfizer was marketing expensive Lyrica off label to people with diabetes for neuropathy, which it does not particularly help. That drug was one involved in the settlement.

Given the earnings from the off label campaigns over a decade were probably a lot more than $2 billion the drug companies still come out ahead when they indulge in this kind of behavior.

frankenduf

9/ 8/09 4:06pm

i utterly agree with you- the drug industry spends 3 times more on marketing than R+D- the practical reason our drugs are expensive is that no one is powerful enough to challenge the industry- they essentially wrote the medicare legislation which prohibits the government from bargaining prices down!- no other industrialized country allows this- and the economic power of the industry is staggering- they apparantly can eat a $billion fine for breakfast- the only ones powerful enough to moderate the industry is us- if we demand the Obama administration bargain the prices down (like every other country has always done), then we will get our drugs at canadian prices