New Public Citizen report slams pharma industry profits

The 20 largest pharmaceutical corporations collectively profited more than $100 billion each year for three consecutive years (2013 to 2015), exceeding self-reported research and development costs for new medicines, a new Public Citizen report (PDF) released on Friday shows.

“As industry fights affordability, the pattern of profitability shows that struggling patents suffer needlessly to satisfy Big Pharma greed,” it stated. A primary excuse the pharmaceutical industry uses for price gouging is the high cost of R&D these corporations pay to bring new medicines to market, the consumer advocacy noted.

Even the inflated estimates of R&D reported by the industry are dwarfed by the industry’s profits, which, for the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies, jumped from $100.6 billion in 2014 to $124.7 billion in 2015 – nearly 24%.

“Big Pharma says that high prices pay for R&D, but it turns out more of their revenue is going for profits than R&D investments,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “The pricing system is broken and needs fundamental change,” he argued.

Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program, added: “Corporations abuse their monopoly power to charge people as much as we will pay to care for our loved ones. Prices are not related to R&D costs. The public puts in $30 billion of our own every year for biomedical research through the taxpayer-funded National Institutes of Health. We deserve affordable medicines in turn.”