I don’t think we even need pharmaceutical companies to exist. The most important groundbreaking research is done in Universities, with public funding. So the people already own the discoveries that underlie medications. Why do we have to pay again and again for things that already belong to us? The only thing pharmaceutical companies are good for is manufacturing, packing, shipping. That’s it. They’re just about as useless as insurance companies.
The defunding of universities and stripping down of NIH grants is how big pharma likes it, so they can claim that we need them to do the research and they can set up a brain drain of scientists out of shitty dead-end university jobs (people doing crappy post-doc number 5) into their own lucrative jobs.
Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals
In the past, pharmaceutical firms have cited the high costs of drug research as an excuse for high prices of new products (though the high prices of the past were nothing compared to the five and six digit prices of today’s new products). As the public discovers that the drug industry's advertising budgets are typically three times their research budgets, and much of the research is funded through government programs such as those of the NIH, the firms apparently have decided that this argument is no longer as persuasive, and so they have to find another reason to justify outrageous pricing.
90 percent of all new drugs approved by the FDA over the past 30 years are little or no more effective for patients than existing drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry has corrupted the practice of medicine through its influence over what drugs are developed, how they are tested, and how medical knowledge is created.
None of this is likely to happen until third-party payers, politicians, and the people decide they want to stop paying so much for so many drugs of little value and then for treating the millions harmed by those drugs."
If we throw a fraction of the money we waste on the military, at the NIH, we wouldn’t even need the pharmaceutical companies! You may look here and here if you're interested to find out about how much publicly funded research and development can accomplish.
The study in the New England Journal of Medicine determined that publicly financed research programs have spawned 153 new therapeutic entities over the past forty years, breaking it down to 93 small-molecule therapies, 36 biologicals, 15 vaccines, eight diagnostic tools and one OTC drug.
...
The public has helped finance the development of some of the world's biggest blockbusters, including game-changers like Remicade for rheumatoid arthritis and the pain drug Lyrica. The scientific research community wasted no time in seizing on the report to illustrate just how important federal financing is to the field.
Big pharma, big oil, big insurance: evil trio
