Looking for someone who works in a pharmaceutical company who is willing to answer these by email:
1.Drug costs have been increasing about 15% per year, and are one of the fastest growing health care costs. Have you experienced this and if so, to what do you attribute this?
2.Do you think that the increasing trend to buy drugs from Canada will lead to American companies lowering their prices? If so will this impact the ability of new drugs to be produced?
3.What does your company give higher importance, marketing and advertising of new prescription drugs or research and development? Why?
4.Does your company pursue any methods of lowering costs of prescription drugs? If so, what? If not, why not?
5..Many companies state that the high costs are in part to offset research and development costs. Is this so in your organization?
Anyone who can help, this is for a school project, please email:
businessethicsstudent@yahoo.com
Hey, i did a year in industry working for a drug company as a research chemist, i can answer a few of the questions but in general big corporations dont give away their strategy…anyway;
1. I havnt expoerienced increased drug prices, but when a drug company discovers/designs a new drug (which can take up to 25 years and cost millions of pounds) they can get a patent which allows them to be the only people allowed to manufacture it. This patent lasts 20 years and can be extended to 25. This is when companies make back their investment and start making profit as they can essentially charge whatever they want for the product. After this time other companies can make and sell the same drug, allowing competition to drive the price down.
2. Interesting, probably better to ask an economist, but drug companies invest a great deal in research and development of new drugs, the more money they make, the more research they can carry out, so i imagine a loss in profit would affect the discovery of new drugs.
3. Research and development by a long long way. Its all very well selling a drug but without new novel drugs being designed a company will eventually become unprofitable
4. I dont know, when a drug is developed there are sometimes many different ways to synthesise it. Some of these methods are cheaper than others. Drug companies will try to find the cheapest easiest way to synthesise a drug as possible – this will then lower the cost of the drug.
5. Well, to a degree, it does cost a ridiculous amount to discover and develop a drug. Sometimes research leads to a dead end, in fact in my experience around 10 out of a hundred drug programmes will actually make it to human testing. Drug companies take this cost into consideration and budget the amount onto the cost of a successful drug + profit.
In my experience drug companies arent the evil people that the media make them out to be. They require healthy competition and government monitering so that they behave ethically, but in general its the only way that new drug treatments are developed.
hope this helps