Heartland liberal

It’s a notion that conservative columnists and think tanks — including Andrew Sullivan — have pushed with great confidence: pharmaceutical manufacturers in America and elsewhere must be able to charge exorbitant prices because they then plow that money into research and development which yields the next new wonder drugs.

But if we start with the baseline average that big pharma likes to put forth — that it takes $2.6 billion dollars R&D to bring a drug from basic science through FDA final approval — then AARP says its own analysis says that big pharma makes back its $2.6 billion dollars relatively quickly and then goes on to reap huge profits:

A new AARP analysis finds that the billions of dollars Medicare Part D spent over five years for just 10 top brand name prescription drugs more than made up for the money drugmakers say it costs to research and develop new medications.

AARP’s Public Policy Institute looked at total Medicare spending between 2016 and 2020 on the 10 brand name drugs that the program spent the most on in 2020. This research found that, for example, Medicare spent $27.2 billion during that period to pay for Eliquis, a blood thinner used to treat atrial fibrillation (Afib), a condition that causes an irregular heartbeat. That’s more than 10 times what the pharmaceutical industry says is the average cost to develop a new drug: $2.6 billion.

“These findings speak to the drug companies’ ongoing argument that they can’t reduce prices because they need that money for research and development,” says Leigh Purvis, AARP Public Policy Institute director of health care costs and access. “What this shows is that they’ve more than recouped those costs from Medicare Part D alone.”

On average, total Part D spending on the drugs reviewed over the five-year period was more than five times higher than the average cost to develop a new drug.

As part of its Fair Drug Prices Now campaign, AARP has called on Congress to lower the prices of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drugmakers, placing a cap on Part D out-of-pocket costs and levying penalties on companies that raise medication prices higher than the rate of inflation.

Purvis pointed out that the money the drugmakers get from Medicare doesn’t include sales of the drugs through other types of health care coverage or sales in other countries. “This is just a small snapshot of how much money they are making from these drugs,” Purvis said.

The AARP report also cited 2021 data from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, which found that from 2016 to 2020, the 14 leading drug companies spent $577 billion on stock buybacks and dividends—$56 billion more than they spent on R&D over the same period. The $2.6 billion average cost of development, Purvis said, is an industry-generated estimate and other researchers have challenged that figure as too high.

Keep in mind that many highly respected drug development studies have disputed that $2.6 billion cost-of-development figure, saying it’s actually much lower for almost every drug developed. Note also that, very often, much of the cost of basic science and clinical trials is borne by the government through the NIH (i.e., the taxpayers).

You can read the rest here.