Pharmaceutical Industries
About The Pharmaceutical Industries.
It's a well-known fact that America is getting ripped off. The bribing system is causing this to happen. While some medications are worthwhile, almost all drug development is done by the government and then taken over and marketed by private industry.
Have you ever wondered why only in America can prescription drugs be advertised directly to consumers? It's no wonder we pay ten times more for prescriptions. Pharmaceutical companies advertise drugs you need a prescription for, but the commercials quickly rattle off all the ways the drug can harm you and place fine print too small to read. They're not selling to you, they're influencing the corporate media against you.
America is the only developed country in the world that spends twice as much money per person on healthcare every year. Yet, we actually receive worse outcomes than other countries. This is because of a bloated insurance industry that sucks money out of the system. Over 500,000 Americans go bankrupt every year because of medical bills – this only happens in America. Our pharmaceutical prices are tens of times higher than anywhere else in the world because of the Supreme Court's legalization of bribery. The Bribe System involves a massive amount of money being passed around between industry, government, and politicians that eventually ends up in the pockets of billionaires.
According to a study, from 2012 to 2021, the 14 biggest publicly-traded drug companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends. This is more money than the $660 billion they spent on research and development. These drug companies and their lobbying groups argue that the cost of innovation is too high to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices.
Over the past two years, the pharmaceutical industry has spent at least $645 million on federal lobbying. The OpenSecrets Organization reports that the healthcare industry gave $689,466,798 to Congress Members and Senators for favors in 2021. In 2020, they took $543 billion dollars from us. This is money stolen from the American people and our economy.
Americans pay ten times more for insulin than citizens of other countries. For example, the average list price for a unit of insulin is $98.70 in the United States, while it is much cheaper in other developed countries like Australia, the UK, and Canada where the average price is $8.23. This happens when Big Pharma buys off a country's political system. This is not acceptable and has to change.
The Bribe System also costs lives. According to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in June 2022, a single-payer universal healthcare system could have saved about 212,000 lives in 2020. They also estimate that having a single-payer universal healthcare system could save $438 billion per year during a non-pandemic year.
Purdue Pharma is an example of how the Bribe System works. If you pay politicians and the Corporate Media for "advertising," you can get away with anything. The Sackler Family, who owns Purdue Pharma, made over Ten Billion Dollars in profits from OxyContin, a drug that has killed over 600,000 people. They knew they were lying to the public and promoting a drug that was causing deaths, but they did it anyway. They paid Six Billion Dollars in fines but still made a Four Billion profit. Nobody has gone to jail for this.
The United States is the only country where drug companies can advertise their products directly to consumers. We pay 10 times more for prescription drugs than people in other countries.
In October 2020, Purdue Pharmaceutical admitted to breaking the law by cheating federal agencies, paying doctors to prescribe their opioids, and lying to the government about it. They were fined 8.3 billion dollars, but the owners still kept 4 billion in profits. The pharmaceutical industry can be complex and difficult to understand, especially during the pandemic. On one hand, pharmaceutical companies can use government research to create life-saving medications, but sometimes they make mistakes and cause harm. Some people believe that the pharmaceutical industry is trying to cheat us, while others believe they are trying to help us. The truth is that some pharmaceutical companies do good things and some do bad things.
During the pandemic, some pharmaceutical companies made a lot of money. At least 40 new billionaires were created in the industry, and pharmaceutical corporations made $1,000 in profits every second. Two-thirds of Congress received funding from pharmaceutical companies during the 2020 election. Pfizer's chairman said they were developing the covid vaccine for the good of humanity, but they still made $100 billion in profits in 2022. The American public paid for the research and development of the vaccine, but the pharmaceutical companies took all the profits.
Topic Related Merchandise
Talking Points Information
There are 1,500 Pharmaceutical Lobbyists trying to give billions of dollars to the Members of Congress.
Three Pharmacy Benefits Management companies (Cigna, CVS Health & United Healthcare) control 80% of the pharmacy benefit market.
Industry Profile: Pharmaceuticals/Health Products.
Sick with “Shareholder Value”: US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model During the Pandemic,