Did U.S. taxpayers subsidize drug companies’ advertising?
Though not definitive, that’s what a recently published study in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests. Sanofi-Aventis and Bristol-Myers Squibb spent about $70 million per year to co-market anti-clotting drug Plavix, the study’s researchers said. As NPR reports: The researchers suggest that companies passed much of those costs on to taxpayers by hiking the price they charge Medicaid programs for the drug. Twenty-seven Medicaid programs — which insure low-income people — spent an extra $200 million on the drug during the advertising campaign compared to what they were paying before the ads began rolling. Yet even with this outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars, the ads didn’t increase the number of prescriptions physicians wrote for the drug, as Reuters reports. Ouch. Another PR success for Big Pharma! This incident would only seem to bolster the case for those who seek to ban consumer advertising of prescription drugs.
