How is it that pharmaceutical (thank goodness for spell check) companies are always coming up with pills to treat simptoms but never to cure them?

Is the outragous cost of perscription drugs really due to this mandatory "research and development" we keep hearing about, or is it simply the college textbook scheme: "charge as much as you like cuz the suckers got no place else to go"?

Why has our government, on both sides of the isle, been so reluctant to intercede in any significant way? Can anyone touch these pill pushers?

The questions are only semi-rhetorical. I actually would like to know the answers. I think a lot of Americans would.

is a combination of old R&D, the subsidizing of socialized healthcare in other countries and the need to pay new for new R&D. Not only that, but the patent life of most drugs is relatively short once they hit market, so they need to recoup the R&D money and make some profit quickly.

As far as the drugs themselves, if you don't like them don't take them. No one is making you.

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

My mom has a terminal illness. The drug that works best for her is prohibitively expensive (over $3k per month). So, since she is now on medicare, she is taking a less effective drug. The really odd thing is that aside from one ingredient (the more effective drug does not contain a certain preservative), the more effective drug is identical to the less effective drug. Yet it costs twice as much. Interestingly enough, this company has a monopoly on the more effective drug which is used to treat cystic fibrosis, a fatal illness that primarily impacts children.

Isn't that interesting? I'd hate to speculate why this particular drug is twice as expensive.

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.

is a perservative, then why is one drug so much more effective than the other one? I can't imagine the perservative makes all the difference (but I'm not a chemist!)

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

Not sure why...I guess because it is a bio-drug the preservative somehow limits the effectiveness of it.

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I'll get nicer when you get smarter.

Spend a HUGE part of their budget on advertising. Much of their R.&D. is devoted to developing "lifestyle" drugs and drugs that mimic successful drugs marketed by the competition (like yet another B.P. drug or acid reflux drug or arthritis med).

There is an article in this month's "Foreign Affairs" magazine about how completely ill-prepared we are in this country for the very real threat of a flu pandemic, in part because big Pharma does not make high profit margins developing and administering vaccines and the Bush administration has under funded public health and chosen to focus on unlikely bioterrorist threats like e-boli and small pox. The worst case senario makes your hair stand on end.

Does anyone here remember when microwave ovens were $500? When VCRs were several hundred dollars? PCs were $2000? Once the R&D was paid for they all came down in price. They also got to immediately begin to recoup their investment. They did not have to wait for FDA approval. If you want cheap new drugs, you can go to Mexico. A friend of mine got a very effective arthritis drug there. She was grateful to have such relief - until it caused massive kidney failure and she had to find a new kidney.

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"Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves." ~Ronald Reagan

That's for sure-- and apparently they have plenty of "research" money to do it. At least where I live, about 3/4 the commercials that show during prime time news are for perscription drugs. And these aren't just quick beer commercials either, these are long and extravegent. But then, half the air time consists of grinning adults living the high life to exuberant music while some guy rattles off the drug's potential side affects.

Oh, that it were that simple.

It isn't myself I'm concerned about-- not yet, at least. For many people, particularly the elderly, perscription drugs are a matter of life and death. We're not talking about allergy medicine here. There are many elderly individuals who have literally been impoverished trying to pay for the drugs that keep them alive. It's a rather pitiful situation, really. We have the means to live longer and have an (arguably) higher quality of life in our final years than ever before-- but at what price? Why, whatever price the pharmacuetical kings choose, of course.

Maybe that's way too sincical, but it's sure the way things look sometimes.

Um...because curing something is a lot harder than treating it?

That seems obvious to me.

It may not be the ingredient itself, but the process of creating it that makes it so expensive. From what I understand, the process for creating a lot of substances is not as straight forward as it my seem to laymen.

There are government assistance programs to compensate for the cost. The bottom line is that better healthcare will always cost more though.

The alternative is to have the government fund the R&D...the end result being that medicine will advance more slowly. Thats the trade off. The current system gives drug companies more of an incentive. More money = being able to hire bigger brains and get access to more resources.