Drugmakers' Group Has $100 Million for Possible Ad Campaign on Health-Care Reform
By Dan Eggen
The pharmaceutical industry's largest lobbying group could spend $100 million or more on an ad campaign this fall, but the organization is waiting to make a decision until details of health-care reform legislation become clearer, the group's chief lobbyist a top official said Tuesday.
Ken Johnson, senior vice president at the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), said the group's board has approved the idea of launching an aggressive media campaign later this year, particularly if legislation coming out of the Senate or House includes measures strongly opposed by drugmakers. But Johnson also stressed that PhRMA, which ranks as the biggest health-care lobbying organization in Washington, has so far avoided negative advertising and has supported overall reform.
"What our board did was give us the green light to spend extra resources if needed," Johnson said. "But we're still assessing that need right now and absolutely no decision has been made. The fall campaign, if there is one, has yet to be decided."
The possibility of such a massive ad campaign, first reported by Bloomberg News, would mark a dramatic shift in strategy by the major drugmakers, who have agreed to lower drug costs by $80 billion over the next 10 years in hopes of gaining millions of new customers under a reform plan. The group is currently participating in a pro-reform ad campaign featuring the original "Harry and Louise" characters, who were the basis of ads in the early 1990s that helped scuttle Bill Clinton's attempt to remake the health-care system. PhRMA will spend about $5 million total on advertising during the month of August, Johnson said.
News of PhRMA's deliberations came on the same day that President Obama raised the possibility of demanding more concessions from the drug industry to help expand coverage for 47 million uninsured Americans. Speaking to members of the AARP seniors group, Obama referred to the $80 billion pledge by the pharmaceutical industry: "I think we can get a potentially even better deal than that."
PhRMA, which represents 28 major drugmakers, has spent more than $13 million so far this year on lobbying, according to disclosure reports. The industry has generally been successful in rebuffing ideas that it strongly opposes, including allowing the importation of lower-cost drugs from Canada.
By
Dan Eggen
|
July 28, 2009; 4:13 PM ET
Categories:
Daily Dose
,
Health Reform
Save & Share:
Previous: On the Hill, Elizabeth Edwards Calls Attention to Medical Bankruptcies
Next: The Murky Effect of Insurance Exchanges
Posted by: lensch | July 30, 2009 7:36 AM | Report abuse
Basically what they want patients to do is to get their physicians to prescribe drugs they do not need. Clearly physicians will prescribe drugs they need without marketing. This is the purpose of the odious ads we are bombarded with on TV, radio, and print media as well as in the mail and on the NET. When I was young, these were illegal and it is my understanding they could be made illegal again by act of Congress. Drug advertising to patients is illegal in all other countries except possibly New Zealand and Canada.
Drug marketing to physicians is enormous and multifaceted. The purpose here is to get physicians to use new expensive drugs in cases where older cheaper drug do as well if not better. Sometimes the newer drugs also have bad side effects that have not yet been discovered or have been concealed by the companies, e.g. Vioxx. It would take a book to examine all the techniques used by the companies. Let me mention some. There are the “pushers” that haunt doctors’ offices. One of my doctors requires them to give their spiel in the waiting room so I have been able to hear them twice. What is immediately obvious is that these people are totally unqualified. You can read about them here,
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/drug-reps.
We could probably eliminate them by requiring they had some qualifications such as a degree in pharmacology, or biochemistry, or whatever.
The most scandalous techniques involve payments to physicians. The industry is constantly telling us the have reformed this practice which is the followed in a little while by news of yet more outrages. I’ll leave it at that except to recommend you read
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/magazine/25memoir-t.html
which give you a good feeling for the morals of the drug companies.
It seems clear we could cut drug prices by a third by eliminating most of the money spent on marketing. This need not impact R & D or even their profit and would have a beneficial effect on the health care of the country. This would save the $100 Billion a year I mentioned previously. In addition, there would be saving from the use of cheaper drugs and the elimination of unnecessary ones.
Posted by: lensch | July 30, 2009 7:36 AM | Report abuse
The comments to this entry are closed.
Alan Sager of BU has spent his career studying drug companies. He has found that spend about 11% of their budget on R & D, about 19% on profit and about 34% on “marketing”. These are rough figures, and they vary from year to year. Sometimes the drug companies do not dispute these figures and sometimes they do. If you read the comments at http://views.washingtonpost.com/healthcarerx/panelists/2009/06/priorities-brennan.html, you can see a case where they do dispute the figures and make up your own mind.
About the R & D, most of it is “D”. It is very expensive to do the tests required by the FDA to get the drug approved, and this is done by the drug companies. Most of the basic research is not done by the drug companies, but by universities and the Institutes of Health. For example, Jonas Salk was at Carnegie – Mellon when he developed his polio vaccine. The drug companies will not investigate a drug until someone else has shown it has a very strong possibility of success. A famous example here is stem cell research. Why were Federal funds required? Why didn’t the drug companies do the research? The answer is that they did not have strong enough evidence to invest their research funds. Of course, this attitude will not lead to the discovery of many new drugs.
The only thing I want to say about their profit is that it is roughly double the average of all US industries.
Marketing has two purpose, one directed toward users and one directed towards physicians. Since physicians have the ultimate control (they write the prescriptions), the effort towards them is the larger.
(cont)