Last month I wrote: The drug companies tell us how much they spend on research and development and they do spend a lot of money doing that. But what they don’t tell us is how much money they spend on promoting their products. Those multi-color full-page ads in medical journals and other publications cost a ton of money. Those TV ads aren’t cheap either. Add to that the cost of sending out thousands of pharmaceutical representatives to doctors and pharmacies detailing their drugs and bribing doctors with interest free loans, all kinds of expensive little knickknacks and, in some cases, lavish entertainment for doctors, their nurses and their clerical staff. (Drug Companies Are Gouging Patients, Medicare And Medicaid, And Increasing The Federal Deficit / 3-26-13)
As an example, let’s take a look at just one drug, Cialis, the erectile dysfunction drug marketed by Eli Lilly and Company. I’m sure that millions of dollars were spent on developing this drug. But I am also sure that much more money has been spent by Lilly on marketing Cialis than it cost to develop the drug.
There have been quite a few different Cialis TV commercials. How much do you think it cost to produce each of those commercials? Better yet, those commercials are shown daily on multiple TV channels. How much do you think that costs Lilly?
Ad to those TV commercial costs what it costs Lilly for those multi-color full-page ads in medical journals and other publications, and what it costs to promote Cialis by hundreds of Lilly pharmaceutical representatives. You can bet that when you total up all those costs, Lilly will have spent a whole lot more money on marketing Cialis than was ever spent on developing the drug.
And who is getting gouged for all those marketing costs? Patients each time they are getting their Cialis prescriptions filled. I suspect that by subtracting the marketing costs of Cialis, if Lilly charged only 20 percent of what it does now, it would still make a tidy profit.
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