Big Pharma Crowds out Innovation

Nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is covered by a health plan all year that doesn't ensure affordable access to care. The problem? Big Pharmaceutical companies raise prices on consumers all while operating under the guise of faux-innovation. Indeed, pharmaceuticals act as monopolies. The term "Big Pharma" isn't thrown around online forums, political debates, courtrooms, and news segments without obvious reason. Big Pharmaceutical companies hold a hand around the neck of small pharma and squeeze their grasp ever so tightly as to ensure no innovation ever occurs. As the pockets of monopolized pharmaceuticals get fatter and wider, the pockets of the consumers, the American public, are drained. To defend their unlawful practices, Pharmaceutical giants try to justify their immense earnings by pouring it all directly towards "innovation". Despite how it may seem on paper, the truth is clear: large-scale private companies are the same entities killing any new chance of scientific advancement in favor of greed. A systemic problem exists within healthcare and big pharma is the root of the issue.

The myth that large pharmaceutical companies pay for their expensive clinical trials and thus rightfully earn the intellectual property and the profits that come with it has been thoroughly debunked. Large pharmaceutical companies have been shifting away from "Research and Development" and more into "Search and Development" allowing the majority of early drug development research to be done by publicly funded research institutes and universities. Essentially, Big pharma leads consumers to believe that high drug prices are a result of the high cost of testing, layered on top of R&D costs. In reality, inflated costs are just an excuse to accumulate wealth.

The problem with the narrative pharmaceutical companies try to push to the American public is that the primary cause of drug price inflation is research and development. If the publicly funded portions of the drug development process are subtracted from the total cost of drug development, the net cost private companies face to bring a fully tested drug to the market decreases nearly 10-fold from what company estimates report. Corruption and greed are both evident as the public has to deal with artificially inflated prices. For example, in recent years, there has been an extensive need for new antibiotics; despite this, there has been a decrease in new antibiotics being developed and tested by the private sector. Pharmaceutical companies are downsizing and eliminating their antibiotic discovery programs, citing "barriers limiting profitability" as an excuse. In their own words, companies care more about profit than health.

Crucially, there must be a change in the common consensus that Big Pharma is the only driver of innovation in the medical field. Startup companies can not only hold their own when it comes to development but also outperform corporations when it comes to bringing life-changing drugs to market. Precisely, in a case study looking at novel drug approvals from 2013 - 2022, the results found that in spite of large R&D operations, the world's largest pharmaceutical companies do not efficiently convert R&D spending on products developed in-house, particularly compared with emerging, smaller companies. On the other hand, the largest companies maximize earnings by both charging higher prices as well as acquiring additional intellectual property through licensing deals or acquisitions. This is crucial; empirically, the strategies of smaller companies are much more efficient and beneficial to the individual consumer.

By prioritizing equitable access in both the production and consumption aspects of the process, life-saving medications will finally be distributed properly. A small-scale redistribution of resources at the government's disposal could ultimately lead to a compromise solution in which smaller companies develop new and innovative biomedical technology while bigger companies distribute it. On the contrary, the status quo proves to be a far worse situation in which monopolized pharmaceuticals control every level of the medical process from innovation to distribution.