Paying for Medical Care & Prescription Drugs: Funding Advertisers, Executives, and the Corporate Privileged Class

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Original Poster: National Archives
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One of the most important political and social issues in the coming years will likely be the cost of medical care, especially the cost of prescription drugs. Medical care has always been an important issue, of course, but in America today more and more people are requiring drugs and treatment which are getting more and more expensive. This creates a growing constituency for efforts to reduce costs. There is also growing evidence that the current costs of this care are not justified by defensible market factors, which makes it easier for citizens to demand changes. The profits of drug companies are also growing, which gives them lots of disposable money to buy lawmakers.

The main reason for the growing demand for medical care and prescription drugs is pretty clear: America is getting older and most serious diseases affect older Americans. A further reason, not always consciously recognized right away, is how the pharmaceutical industry is getting better at developing new drugs to treat various conditions. There are lots of important drugs and treatments available to day that weren’t available a couple of decades ago. Even if the costs of these treatments were half of what they are now, the overall costs would still be higher. We can’t have new and better treatments for difficult conditions without expecting to pay more in the long run.

At the same time, however, not all of the increased costs are justified by defensible market factors. Pharmaceutical companies run lots of ads claiming that drug prices today pay for the research for the next generation of drugs, but that’s tough to swallow when the marketing and advertising budgets for these companies are higher than their R&D budgets. I think most people would be willing to pay more to fund further research if these companies spent more on research than on trying to sell us stuff.

Speaking of which, it’s debatable whether so much advertising of prescription drugs should be allowed. It’s good for people to know their options, but there is evidence that people who demand a particular drug will often get it whether they need it or not. Marketing to physicians is even worse because it can cause them to prescribe a drugs for reasons other than the patient’s best interest — and even without the physician realizing it. Advertisements created by marketing departments simply don’t qualify as the sort of “information” that creates an informed and educated consumer.

Thus we have pharmaceutical companies flush with money which they can “donate” to politicians who coincidentally write laws which favor those same companies, protecting or increasing their profits. All that money has to come from somewhere, though, and it’s not just out of the pockets of patients who can’t really afford to keep paying so much. Companies which offer health insurance are paying, too — and they growing frustrated over this. As their costs increase, so does their willingness to consider alternative ways of delivering health care. We may be getting to the point where there is major corporate support for some form of “socialized” medicine.

All of this should come together to create very serious political conflicts: will lawmakers respond to the demands of voters and more than a few corporations, or will they respond to the campaign “donations” of major pharmaceutical companies? Thus far trends have favored the latter, but that may change — and the weight of corporations tired of shouldering the increasing costs of health insurance may have more than a little to do with this. It would be unfortunate, though, if the only way to achieve justice for the people is if it’s in the economic interests of large companies. Should that be the case, it won’t be so much a victory for the people as it will be a sign of the extent to which that the people have been bought and paid for by corporate America.