Analysis Of Marcia Angell's The Truth About The Drug Companies

There seems to be no law protecting patients from the price increases that these big pharmaceutical companies are making. Marcia Angell, is an American physician, author, and the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. In chapter 10 of her book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, she talks about stretching out the idea on monopoly. Patents makes it illegal for a specific set amount of time for competitors to sell the same/similar drugs. Once the patent is over, when the company loses its rights to a drug, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) arranges for the generic version of the drugs made by a different company to go out on the market. When there is only one generic brand on the market, the cost may not be as cheap because the generic brand and the brand name shadow prices. This keeps the generic version just beneath the price of the brand name. Although the generic is not that much cheaper than the brand name, in the course of one year, the brand name company will lose hundred of millions of dollars due to generic drugs. From an economic point of view,

Doctor Tristram Engelhardt, an American philosopher, argues that the importance of these profits is to acquire resources and to productively make new discoveries. These profits will secure recourses for these companies and that with the extra money, these pharmaceutical companies can be more innovative. With these profits, more effort will be put in to decreasing morbidity and mortality risks. According to Engelhardt, if these companies decrease profits, the amount of resources and energies available to be innovative will also decrease, leading to more risks. However, Stan Frinkelstein and Peter Temin states that we can eliminate the link between drug prices and drug discovery by developing the Drug Development Corporation, that will solve this problem, as mention in the last