This week’s topic was very interesting and really tied together the entire class, why we are
here and learning outcomes research. I think it is pretty clear that the Pharmacetuical
Industry is extremely powerful and unethically charges too much for drugs without any
bases/proof that it needs to charge that much because just across the border in
Canada,same formulary of drugs are 10 times less.
I think the pharmaceutical industry has ties in the politics or there is some kind of
corruption going on in Washington DC/lobbying that allows laws such as the ones cited in
the “60 Minutes” segment. Most likely pharmaceutical industry is paying large sums of
money to politicians to keep such laws in place. Until that corruption can be done away
with, we will not see a change/drop in prices.
I read somewhere that our GDP spending in healthcare is 50% pharmaceutical industry.
Yet I am surprised to not find much regulation/policy in the ACA/Obamacare. Just by
regulating policy on pharmacetuical industry, we could cut our GDP spending by half and
catch up to other countries. Our GDP only went up and pharmaceutical
Companies were not touched at all. This to me just speaks that there is corruption going on
in the government.
I think that Cost-Effectivenss research is going to play a big role in the future as healthcare
industry is now under the microscope to cut down on costs. However, I wonder if