|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Friday, July 19, 2002At least, that’s what I found myself thinking as I sat there giving up more and more of my precious lunch break to his sales pitch. Not that I listened very carefully to his pitch. Instead, I thought about the enormous funds devoted to marketing by drug companies. I thought about copycat drugs, like Nexium, the drug he was selling. I thought about the legal gymnastics his company had performed to block the generic version of Prilosec from coming to the market, so they could gain time to grab more market share for the more expensive mirror-image version of it that is Nexium. I thought of how proud they are of their Nexium sales, and its market share, ($580 million dollars in 2001, and 16% of new prescriptions.) I thought of their ubiquitous ads, and of how much they must have cost. The longer I sat there, the more he seemed to personify all that is wretched in the pharmaceutical industry. Then, he did something that caught my attention. Suddenly his pitch became much more personal. He produced a reprint of a study comparing Nexium to Prevacid, the drug in this class which I prefer to prescribe. He mentioned that about forty percent of my patients have a health insurance plan that uses the dreaded Merck-Medco for pharmacy benefits. I have never shared any of this information with him or any other drug rep. I doubt very much if any of my staff ever has, either. It could only mean that he had resorted to the Big Brother technology available to pharmaceutical companies to profile my prescribing habits and my patient mix. It was chilling, and it was maddening. Finally he delivered what he thought was the coup de grace. He told me my patients were spending more on co-pays for Prevacid than they would for Nexium, for although Nexium costs around $120 a month out of pocket, it is the preferred drug for Merck-Medco because it “has met their high quality standards.” Right. I guess he thought I didn’t know that Merck profits from sales of Nexium, as well as from its twin, Prilosec. A person can only take so much. I dropped all pretense of politeness and told him exactly what I thought of Nexium and of his company. Needless to say, I didn’t get a free pen. Call for Reform: I probably could have maintained my polite demeanor if I hadn’t just read the Families USA report on pharmaceutical industry spending that morning. (The report is available on their site, but it’s in pdf format.) Not only does it make note of the disproportionate amount of money spent on promotion by the industry, it also points out that research and development are not high on their list of priorities by any measure: Beyond spending patterns, staff allocation reflects an organization’s focus. Staffing patterns reported by some of the companies in this study confirm the industry’s focus on marketing over research and development. In 2001, Merck added 1,000 sales representatives to its U.S. operations alone. Of the company’s 78,100 employees, 85 percent were engaged in non-research activities. Allergan reported that it had 1,700 employees in sales representative positions, which represents only a portion of all employees engaged in marketing-related activities. In comparison, 1,100 people were involved in the company’s research and development efforts. These staffing patterns are consistent across the industry. A report released in December 2001 found that brand-name drug makers in the U.S. employ 81 percent more people in marketing than in research. This study also found that marketing staffs increased by 59 percent between 1995 and 2000, while research staffs declined by 2 percent. I don’t begrudge a company its profits, or a CEO his just salary, but any industry that invests more in promotion than in innovation is ultimately doomed. Would Bayer have lasted as long as it has if they had relied solely on aspirin? The board members and the CEO’s of these companies need to examine their current policies and reform their spending habits. Otherwise, they’ll be left with nothing as their patents expire one by one, as they eventually must, despite their best efforts. Bedfellows: Opensecrets.org has more on the generic drug bill and the Pfizer/Pharmacia merger. posted by Sydney on 7/19/2002 06:11:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
