Corporate and governmental hucksters intentionally cloak their schemes in convoluted obfuscations… so we commoners can’t really know what they’re saying… or doing to us.
That’s why our Hightower Lowdown team takes pride in regularly trying to deconstruct their arcane jargon, translating it into plain language. Recently, for example, I pointed out the slick deceit in Big Pharma’s assertion that its outrageously-high drug prices are just a factor of “core cost recovery.” Huh? That’s supposed to mean that it costs a lot to do basic research for discovering new medicines, so they must recover those costs.
But wait, I hollered: Basic drug research is not paid for by brand-name corporate monopolists. Rather, this essential humane work is done by such public entities as the National Institutes of Health – paid for by us taxpayers. And it’s a huge tax-paid subsidy to these private profiteers. In 2020, a study by the Institute for New Economic Thinking laid out the scam in stark terms: “Taxpayers have been footing the bill for every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019.” Hello – every new drug!
The Institute’s study traced the funding of 356 new drugs approved in that period, finding that a whopping $230 billion in public financed research paid for the basic science that created the medicines. In what the researchers called “a robust pipeline” to industry, monopolistic patents were then obtained on those ingredients by Big Pharma to market drugs made possible by the “scientific capital” we taxpayers invested.
For drug profiteers, this is manna from heaven. The system hands new drug products to them, letting them arbitrarily fix prices that enrich their investors with nearly double the profit levels of the other corporate powers. If you suspect the system is rigged to gouge you – there it is!
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How Things Work: Big Pharma Price Gouging