[roadnottaken]

You are simply wrong on this. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a new drug, prior to approval and marketing. What percent of a companies budget is spend on marketing versus R&D at a given time is kind of irrelevant because (1) the development costs occur before market and (2) often drugs are in-licensed or acquired after significant expense towards R&D has been expended. They don’t buy all the companies whose products fail (most of them) so that cost isn’t factored in. Making new drugs is very expensive and risky.

Edit: I’m describing the development of novel drugs here. “Me-too” drugs are significantly less risky and probably less costly but there’s still a lot of risk amd expense.

[grasshopperpurp]

>We found that the premiums pharmaceutical companies earn from charging substantially higher prices for their medications in the US compared to other Western countries generates substantially more than the companies spend globally on their research and development. This finding counters the claim that the higher prices paid by US patients and taxpayers are necessary to fund research and development. Rather, there are billions of dollars left over even after worldwide research budgets are covered. To put the excess revenue in perspective, lowering the magnitude of the US premium to a level where it matches global R&D expenditures across the 15 companies we assessed would have saved US patients, businesses, and taxpayers approximately $40 billion in 2015, a year for which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) reported that total US spending on pharmaceuticals was $325 billion.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170307.05903...

[yequalsx]

Developing drugs costs money. Marketing them does too. Which one has more money spent on it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...