Drug companies should not be allowed to reap excessive profits or spend unreasonable amounts on marketing if they want to receive support that is designed to encourage life- saving and health-improving treatments.
Drug companies spend more on advertising and marketing than on research, more on research on lifestyle drugs than on life saving drugs, and almost nothing on diseases that affect developing countries only. This is not surprising. Poor people cannot afford drugs, and drug companies make investments that yield the highest returns.
As MBA professors endlessly tell their students, companies do best when they stick to what they do well. There's a reason Apple doesn't make blenders. There's a reason Haagen-Dazs doesn't sell meat. And there's a reason drug companies should focus on saving and improving lives - not jeopardizing them.
Drug companies say they need to charge ever-higher prices to cover their research costs, but they spend far less on research and development than they do on marketing and administration, and afterwards they actually keep more in profits.
While I support granting drug companies patents to recover their investment and encourage innovation, companies that take advantage of this goodwill to build a monopoly must be stopped.
Insurance companies, whether private or government owned, must be compelled to pay for health-promoting measures. In turn, this will encourage physicians to offer such treatments in earnest.
Medicare should be allowed to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices on prescriptions.
When it comes to love, everyone wants to receive it, but at the end of the day, you don't get to receive it until you start to give it. That goes for everything. What you give is what you receive. If you want the drug, you have to give the drug.
Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying unprecedented profits and access with this Administration. Yet the Republicans' prescription drug plan for seniors has been a colossal failure, and over 43 million Americans wake up every morning without health insurance.
The greatest form of maturity is at harvest time. This is when we must learn how to reap without complaint if the amounts are small and how to reap without apology if the amounts are big.
I don't spend unnecessarily. The problem with the industry is we don't budget our films. Plus, we spend bizarre amounts on marketing. If you have a good film and a good trailer, you don't need to spend so much.
...we must support and protect individuals and companies engaged in life saving medical research
While many have been left behind by Part D, there is a clear winner: the drug industry. Independent analysts predict that Part D will increase drug industry profits by $139 billion over the next eight years. Glaxo-SmithKline's second-quarter net income already jumped 14 percent, and other leading drug companies also have benefited.
When I took on the drug companies and the insurance companies for universal health care coverage, they went after me with a vengeance.
90 percent of the cost of malaria drugs has come down because of the work of the Clinton Foundation. There are over 10 million people around the globe today receiving life-saving HIV and AIDS drug treatments because of the Clinton Foundation.
I encourage everyone I know to sign an organ donor card, but if someone doesn't want to sign, that's his or her choice. If someone isn't willing to give an organ, however, why should that person be allowed to receive an organ?
In general, drug companies are reasonably good at developing new treatments, and there's also a lot of good in the industry.