Mike the Usurper wrote:
And now to throw a little more fuel on the fire, in the last decade, drug companies have changed one additional factor. Advertising for prescription drugs now exceeds reseach spending by more than an order of magnitude. So when Lilly spends a hundred million on a drug, they're spending over a BILLION on advertising.
Inventing a new drug may be expensive, but lets get real here. There's a reason pharma has been the darling on Wall Street for the last few years, and it's because they're routinely clearing bigger profits than anyone but big oil and Microsoft.
The only things I can think of that have gone up in price more than prescription drugs is a University education and oil since the invasion of Iraq.
Yes, and for each one of the big pharma companies, there are 100 failed biotech companies, many of which never even reach stage 1 trials.
