Only 1-in-10 drugs prescribed are brand name, yet they account for majority of spending

Friday, September 02, 2016 by: L.J. Devon, Staff Writer
Tags: Big Pharma, market exclusivity, medical costs

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(NaturalNews) A new research paper published in JAMA points out a harrowing fact: Brand name drugs are prescribed 10 percent of the time, but they account for 72 percent of the total cost paid for pharmaceutical drugs in the US.

This is a prime example of the rigged American medical system, where people are being monetarily preyed upon. Worse yet, the excess billions of dollars reaped by price gouging consumers are used to promote the drugs to even greater extents, through the media or directly to doctors. In this way, Americans are never introduced to effective, evidence-based medicine.

Rigged medical system

Brand name drugs penalize consumers because of market exclusivity. Pharmaceutical manufacturers in the US block out competition because of patents, while cheaper generic drugs or holistic therapies are suppressed out of the marketplace. Buyers are not allowed to negotiate the price of drugs freely because of the restrictive patent laws. Also, price negotiations cannot be made because information on similar generic drugs cannot be compared to the patented name brand drugs.

Because of these competition-stifling rules, the price of brand name drugs in the US surged 164 percent between 2008 and 2015. Obviously the pharmaceutical industry in this country is not a free market that allows for open competition in helping people get well. Medicine in the US is dominated by brand name drugs that the laws give market exclusivity to.

Competition stifled, negotiations restricted, as Big Pharma takes advantage of Americans

To put these numbers in perspective, Americans spend $858 per capita on prescription drugs. Nineteen other industrialized nations, on average, spend about half that – or $400 per capita. The 20 most popular name brand drugs are three times pricier in the US than in the UK. In these other countries negotiations are allowed; in the US, the drug manufacturers set the prices. Negotiations are blocked and insurers are restricted from fighting for the best deals. This is why medicines like insulin for diabetes increased 300 percent between 2002 and 2013. It is also why cancer treatments are debuting at over $100,000, and insurance rates are skyrocketing to cover the rising costs. Not only is the medical system ignoring the root cause of health issues today, but the drug makers are running the show, pushing out competition, blocking negotiations and shoving their junk science into patients' bodies.

Doctors often follow along with this brand name domination, ignoring cheaper, comparable drugs with the same effects. This drug-intensive approach also blinds patients and their doctors from seeking alternative methods of natural healing that are restorative to the whole body and cheaper in the long run.

Evidence-based or belief-driven? $57.5 billion spent annually on drug promotion

In 2004, two tireless researchers from York University found that the US Pharmaceutical industry spends $57.5 billion annually on drug promotion and advertisement, double what the companies spend on actual research. As the researchers explained, this is equivalent to spending $61,000 per US physician just to promote the drugs. This fact alone reveals that belief in the drugs and perpetual indoctrination are the real driving forces behind pharmaceutical sales. Because of this, people are not being introduced to evidence-based medicine, but are being brainwashed into accepting the notion that they have chronic diseases, only manageable through synthetic pills. Many physicians become the middle men, only peddling what they are paid to prescribe.

While emergency medicine has its place, the pharmaceutical industry as a whole does nothing more than prey on people's minds and their lack of understanding of nutrition utilization and detoxification optimization. This inconvenient truth is evidenced by the statistics. Pharmaceutical "medicine" is a hundred billion dollar industry, but the chronic health problems in the country are only getting worse. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity, neurological dysfunction, behavioral problems and immune system deficiency are all on the rise. The pharmaceutical industry diverts people away from the root causes of their health problems, blocking price negotiations and forbidding competition from cheaper drugs and alternative healing modalities.

Sources include:

FoxNews.com

ScienceDaily.com