Slow rev,
</font><font color="blue" class="small">( I have also heard that doctors get kickbacks from the drug companies for prescribing their medications )</font>
Well Lets cloud the issues with innuendo and heresay.
Not even sure how to address that claim. My wife's best freind is a sales rep for a top tier pharmaceutical company. She tries to get the physicians to presribe her companies drugs if there is a choice ie. more than one drug for an indication. she can leave him with literature, freebies and samples. But there is no "kickback" scheme.
In most states the doctor can give you free samples but can not sell you the drugs. That is why pharmacies exist still today. They keep the doctor from having a vested interest in writing a prescription.
Billy P,
I read Pfizer's annual report. I did not specificly see the 9.1 billion dollar profit. Taken out of context it sounds like a huge number. But they are the largest pharmaceutical company in the world with sales in 2003 of 45 Billion dollars. They also had the top selling drug in 14 different therapeutic areas. That means they are extremely good at what they do and we the public buy their products. They sold 1.8 billion dollars of Viagra in 2003. This market did not even exist 8 years or so ago. They answered an unmet medical need and are being rewarded for it. Of course Viagra itself is an interesting product. $1.8 billion at $10 a pill is a lot of happy males walking around. But ED is not lifethreatening and people still demand it. even funnier is that a lot of presription plans covered Viagra upon it's release. But female birth control pills were often not covered. Where I work the women say it is becuse the men are in charge of the companies. After a lot of pressure many formulary plans noew cover birth control pills.
The advertisement dollars are an issue and a concern. Technically it is not supposed to happen. That's why the ads for say Cialis never mention what it is for.
every one has heard of "the little purple pill" Ads for that were every where. We sell a similar product but were late to market. But our sales rose in direct response to the purple pill commercials even though we never advertised it. apparently as consumers asked their Drs about the purple pill the Drs instead recommended ours ( new to market so fresh in Drs minds but also less side effects)
For whatever reasons the FDA has turned a blind eye to the current marketing. A prior commisioner, David Kessler was a little more activist. He once seized a warehouse of orange juice because they were advertising health benefits. I don't think you'll find that in today's political and business environment.
Lastly I mentioned times and costs to get a drug to market in my first post. I left out one very very important piece of info: approximately 90% of drugs that make it into clinical trials fail. This is usually due to a lack of efficacy - it plain don't work in man the way it did in animals. the other big reason for withdrawal is safety - it's toxic or has adverse effects, etc. So a company can spend a few hundred million dollars to get to first time in man trals and have the drug fail. Ouch that was expensive. naturally that is included in the cost of doing business and theses costs are passed on to the successful drugs. If this business model didn't work there'd be no drugs.
The feds do have an "orphan drug" program were there are incentives to research and produce a drug that has little chance of recouping costs even if it is successful. I think immunizations utilize this. Due to liability issues drug cos started to back away from producing immunizations.
MikePa and Andy,
Thanks for the kind words.
