Big Pharmaceuticals: Client-Driven Manipulation

By: Harnoor Sachar

As of 2019, 20 percent of Americans, more than 40 million adults, cannot afford access to necessary health care, especially treatment drugs produced by large pharmaceutical companies (Reinberg). These companies often defend their atrociously high prices with claims such as “working towards a cure” and “using money towards further research”. The harrowing truth, however, is that pharmaceutical incentives are far more client and profit-based, rather than cure-driven.

    The largest misconception consumers often fall for, is that the primary goal of big pharmaceutical companies is to further research and development, or R&D, eventually finding cures and more efficient treatments for fatal diseases. While research and development may sound like a valid excuse, it does not justify the increasing prices of necessary drugs that are inaccessible to a large part of our population. According to the National Institute of Health, if pharmaceutical companies were “setting the price cap at 20% lower than the optimal monopolistic price [it would] increase the consumer surplus by about 10%, and increase the number of patients using the drug by about 23%. This increase in the number of users almost completely offsets the adverse effect of the price regulation from the perspective of the pharmaceutical company – its revenues decrease by only about 1%.” (Levy & Rizansky 2014). This economic evaluation makes it evident that pharmaceutical companies, who choose to hold on to an additional 1% of revenue despite seeing millions suffer from lack of affordable medication, prioritize their profits much more than their medical initiatives. 

    A specific example of the suffering caused by the prices and profit-based market of the pharmaceutical companies includes the opioid epidemic. An estimated 2 million Americans are addicted to opioids, and rather than seeing these so-called “cure-driven” pharmaceutical companies use their resources to combat it, they have made addiction-treatment drugs inaccessible for a large percent of this population. (Fischer 2018). At the end of the day, it no longer matters whether the pharmaceutical industry is producing treatments, as those who need it most are forced to live without it.

The American narrative is dependent on hopeful ideas such as “progress” and “growth”, and yet these act as a blindfold towards consumers, as pharmaceutical companies use them to conceal their atrocities and manipulate consumers. Corporations that consider themselves cure and treatment driven could never overlook 40 million Americans in need of accessible healthcare and medicine unless it came down to profit and money. Thus, the unfortunate truth remains that pharmaceutical companies are far more profit and client-oriented, rather than cure-driven.