To continue our series shining the spotlight on bad actors in our broken health care system, let’s take a look at the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry, AKA Big Pharma.

Pharmaceutical companies reap massive profits from drug manufacturing that far surpass their research and development costs. In 2021, the world’s largest pharma company based on sales was Pfizer, raking in $72 billion in prescription drug sales (including their Covid-19 vaccine).¹

In the United States, Big Pharma sets its own prices for the prescription medications and life-saving drugs we rely on, which often results in massive price-gouging driven by corporate greed. You might remember when Turing Pharmaceuticals, led by CEO Martin Shkreli, hiked the price for a long-existing parasitic infection treatment from $13.50 to $750 per pill.²

But it’s not an issue of lone bad actors – it is the business model of the entire pharmaceutical industry to hike the prices of existing drugs in order to produce large profits.

Because our country, unlike many developed countries, does not have a single-payer, universal health care system, patients pay the price: in some cases, we pay upwards of 79% more for the same prescription drugs than patients in other parts of the world do.³

After decades of policy proposals, Democrats finally made progress on this critical issue when they gave Medicare the power to begin drug price negotiations through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. For the first time ever, the federal government can now negotiate directly with drug companies to lower the prices of some of the most commonly used medications under Medicare.

The first ten drugs were announced last August, with the Biden Administration revealing that prices for 9 out of 10 of the most expensive and popular medications under Medicare are being slashed by half or more. As a direct result of this, the Medicare program will save $6 billion on prescription drugs, and Medicare beneficiaries will save an additional $1.5 BILLION in out-of-pocket costs in just 2026 alone!⁴

But Big Pharma did everything in its power — from lobbying to lawsuits — to try and stop this. These companies have suggested that price cuts will hurt their ability to research and develop new, groundbreaking medications for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's — but as we saw in the first chart in this email, their profit margins are so obscenely large that this excuse simply isn’t true.

For now, Big Pharma’s legal challenges against the price negotiations have been unsuccessful, and another round of 15 drug price cuts will be announced by February 2025. While this is good news, we know the industry is going to keep up its fight against drug price negotiations and continue to spend millions of dollars on political contributions to convince our elected officials to oppose Medicare for All, which would create a single-payer system and allow the government to negotiate ALL drug prices.

That’s why we must continue to organize around getting Big Pharma out of our politics through our Patients Over Profits campaign, and make all prescription drugs free at the point of service, for every patient, by passing Medicare for All.

In solidarity,

Nurses’ Campaign to Win Medicare for All

 

Sources:

1 - The World's Biggest Players in Pharma
2 - A Decade Marked By Outrage Over Drug Prices
3 - Big Pharma claims lower prices will mean giving up miracle medications. Ignore them.
4 - Medicare drug talks yielded $6 billion in savings