Wednesday, September 02, 2009
How badly are the drug companies ripping us off?
In the last decade, the drug companies have paid $11 billion in fines for illegal practices (like wining and dining doctors to push their drugs). That's not how much profit they've raked off from us. That's just the fines they've paid. It's pocket change, money they could just shrug off out of their immense profits ($80 billion in 2007). No doubt they consider these fines just part of the cost of marketing (2.5 times what they spend on research).
As I've written before, just one more demonstration of why even single-payer health care is not the solution.
