Big Pharma price gouging causes health care costs to sky rocket

[Ryan Cooper, 6-6-23, Prospect managing editor and The Week national correspondent, The American Prospect, “How Big Pharma Rigged the Patent System,” , accessed: 07-07-24, ES]

As usual in health care matters, the U.S. is a huge outlier on drug patents compared to peer nations. Returning to Humira, AbbVie obtained 6.4 times more American patents than it did in the European Union, and its patents ran out in October 2018 on the continent. Another more than four years of patent protection in the U.S. market secured an additional $68 billion in monopoly profits.

All this outrageous price-gouging is a major reason why American health care is so expensive. A 2018 study found that drug spending makes up about 15 percent of U.S. health care spending—the highest fraction of any rich country and much higher in absolute terms because our health care is so expensive. In dollar terms, we spend about half again as much as Switzerland per person, more than twice as much as France, and more than three times as much as the Netherlands. That is largely due to hyper-expensive patented drugs. Just 8 percent of American prescriptions are for brand-name drugs, but thanks to extreme prices—Gilead originally priced its hepatitis C cure at $84,000, though it was later reduced somewhat—they make up 84 percent of total drug spending.