She says she'd rather buy them from her local drugstore near Topsham. But charity begins at home. I think it's time we took that to heart. While Maine's and PhRMA's lawyers dispute the legal aspects of Maine Rx, the bigger question looming behind the Maine proposal and those the presidential candidates have put forward is whether lowering drug costs in the United States would inhibit research as the drug companies claim. Meanwhile, prices in countries that impose price controls, like Canada, remain about 58 percent lower.
Some studies attribute that jump to the recently added costs of advertising.
It's because we're one of the few countries that still has competitive market incentives. But Alan Sager, a professor of public health at Boston University, claims PhRMA's figures are misleading. His own survey of the top six drug companies in the United States show they spent 31 percent of their revenues on marketing and administration last year and only 11 percent on research and development. He also points out that charts from PhRMA's own Web site show that American drug companies have hired more than three times the amount of people to work in advertising than in research between 1993 and 1999. Concannon is even more skeptical of PhRMA's figures.