Pharmaceutical companies are very annoyed with niacin because their products have to compete with it. Some of their cholesterol-lowering drugs cost up to $150 a month while niacin costs about $10.
If you look at the expenses of a great pharmaceutical company, they pay between about 10 to 15 percent of their expenses for research, but they use 30 to 40 percent of their incomes for marketing and promotion. It is not completely wrong that they spend so much, but it is not correct to say that there is a direct connection between the price of drugs and the cost of research. It could be more between the cost of marketing and the cost of the drugs.
Getting a traditional pharmaceutical to the market can cost a billion dollars or more. Newer, more tailored and targeted drugs called biologics are even more complex and expensive. Simple economics dictates that companies and venture funds will invest more in products that can generate a sufficient return.
I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
They're [[harmaceuticals companies] just making a killing out of people's death. And they're benefiting by people's suffering. And I find that obscene. I find it ridiculous in this day and age, that that would happen. And it took President Clinton to go to rogue pharmaceutical companies to copy the antiretroviral drugs for a fraction of the cost.
Pharmaceutical companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in new HIV/AIDS treatments not out of altruism but because they can make up those research costs in sales.
If we greatly expanded primary health care, lower the cost of prescription drugs, we take a giant step forward in lowering health care costs in America.
The cost of prescription drugs in this country is far, far higher than in any other country. You may recall that Donald Trump as a candidate for president talked about how he was going to take on the pharmaceutical industry and it was going to lower prescription drug costs.
One of the technology lessons was to work inside the cost envelope of the developing world to lower costs overall. What's even more important and useful is dramatically lowering power consumption. Everyone wants batteries that can last 10 times longer.
Some big pharmaceutical companies have engaged in dirty tricks to extend their patents, holding monopolies on certain drugs to pad their profits at consumers' expense.
Competition makes things come out right. Well, what does that mean in health care? More hospitals so they compete with each other. More doctors compete with each other. More pharmaceutical companies. We set up war. Wait a minute, let's talk about the patient. The patient doesn't need a war.
American products are better than the Chinese. We do a better job. We make better products. But because the currency is so low versus the dollar versus other things, and so much lower than it should be, it's very hard to compete for our companies.
In our experience, when people make comprehensive lifestyle changes, they usually can reduce or discontinue medications such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, anti-hypertensives, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, nitrates, insulin, and so on.
While I recognize the great value and importance of prescription drugs and strongly support a continued U.S. focus on pharmaceutical research and development, our nation's seniors cannot be asked to subsidize the drug costs of other wealthy industrialized nations any longer.
We compete with very large companies. These are companies like Walmart and Target and Kroger and some very successful digital companies like eBay and Etsy and Wayfair, and we don't have the ability to raise prices in any kind of unfettered way.
We're fighting to lift up Kentucky workers by creating more good-paying jobs, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, expanding access to health care, and making public education a top priority.
When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.