Pharmicutical companies and the burden of R&D

Here's an article that says in a nutshell that market driven Pharmicutical companies don't really do most of the R&D for new drugs. Most of their money is spent on marketing to mass media, lobbying to have their "new" produces introduced faster and trying to pass laws preventing them from being held accountable if they screw up and kill people with bad medicine.

In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry. It is mainly because of this resistance that drug companies are now blanketing us with public relations messages. And the magic words, repeated over and over like an incantation, are research, innovation, and American. Research. Innovation. American. It makes a great story.

But while the rhetoric is stirring, it has very little to do with reality. First, research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration. Most innovative R&D in the US is done by government funded research at universities.

Also, the pharmaceutical industry is not especially innovative. As hard as it is to believe, only a handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies, or the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The great majority of "new" drugs are not new at all but merely variations of older drugs already on the market. These are called "me-too" drugs. As Dr. Sharon Levine, associate executive director of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group, put it,

If I'm a manufacturer and I can change one molecule and get another twenty years of patent rights, and convince physicians to prescribe and consumers to demand the next form of Prilosec, or weekly Prozac instead of daily Prozac, just as my patent expires, then why would I be spending money on a lot less certain endeavor, which is looking for brand-new drugs?

This is the problem with market-driven medicine. What's good for the market is not always what's good for consumers. And without the government, consumers have no recorse against giant multinational conglomorates. Of course with Rumsfeld former CEO of Searle Co. in the whitehouse, we really have no recourse (he used his influence in the Reagan administration to get this on the market and lately pass the most pork filled medicare bill in history which even left Rush Limbaugh astonished).