Share Your World 12/14/21

Recouping research and development (R&D) costs is typically cited by the powerful industry to justify its exorbitant prices and stiff resistance to universal medication coverage public plans, the latter which it’s doing in Canada. However, according to a Huffington Post story, a study conducted by the British Medical Journal found that for every $19 dollars the pharmaceutical industry spent on promoting and marketing new drugs, it put only $1 into its R&D.
(“Pharmaceutical Companies Spent 19 Times More On Self-Promotion Than Basic Research: Report,” updated May 8, 2013)
http://www.huffpost.com/entry/pharmaceutical-companies-marketing_n_1760380 Whenever a federal

Liberal government promises Canadians universal generic-brand medication coverage (and such promises on their own are extremely rare here), the pharmaceutical industry reacts with threats of abandoning their Canada-based R&D (etcetera) if the government goes ahead with its ‘pharmacare’ plan. Why? Because such universal medication coverage, generic brand or not, would negatively affect the industry’s plentiful profits. The profits would still be great, just not as great. Meanwhile, we continue to be the world’s sole nation that has universal healthcare but no similar coverage of prescribed medication, however necessary.

A late-2019 Angus Reid study found that about 90 percent of Canadians — including three quarters of Conservative Party supporters specifically — support a national ‘pharmacare’ plan. Another 77 percent believed this should be a high-priority matter for the federal government. The study also found that, over the previous year, due to medication unaffordability, almost a quarter of Canadians decided against filling a prescription or having one renewed. Not only is medication less affordable, but other research has revealed that many low-income outpatients who cannot afford to fill their prescriptions end up back in the hospital system as a result, therefore costing far more for provincial and federal government health ministries than if the medication had been covered.

Canada is the only universal-health-care-coverage country (theoretically, anyway) that doesn’t also fully cover medication. In order for the industry to continue raking in huge profits, Canadians, as both individual consumers and a taxpaying collective, must lose out huge. And our elected representatives, be they federal (neo)Liberals or Conservatives, shrug their figurative shoulders in favor of the pharmaceutical industry — time and again. This angers me greatly.

Such facts should frequently be made widely public. Yet, I’ve noticed that our elected leaders and mainstream news-media seem to not find such heavy corporate lobbyist manipulation of our governments a societal problem requiring rectification. I fear it has become so systematic thus normalized that those who are aware of it, notably politicians and political writers, don’t bother publicly discussing it.

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