People are always upset with the lobbyists in these situations, which I don't understand. It's hardly surprising that individuals and companies act in their own self interest, and in fact are entitled to do so under the first amendment.

The pharmaceutical industry in particular seems to get a lot of criticism, presumably because people are under the impression that if they were spending less money on lobbying they'd make cure more disease. That's not true though. A few million dollars on lobbying is hardly anything. It costs billions to develop new drugs and it's becoming increasingly difficult. Drug development is not a systematic process, it basically involves mixing different chemicals together and seeing which ones do something. All the obvious drugs have already been found and systematic techniques using genetics are decades away from being viable. I can't blame the pharmaceutical industry for trying to protect themselves from costly government interference.

Why not blame the lawmakers who are so susceptible to lobbying. They're the ones who have an explicit duty to the public.

Looks like it's a bit more than 6 million -

From the linked site:

An analysis by NPR's Dollar Politics team of Andrea Seabrook and Peter Overby finds that America's biggest drug makers spent $40 million lobbying Congress over the last three months.

Agreed, but the graphic only accounted for 6.15 mil, so I was conservative and went with the lower number.

The link is broken now, although from the above comments that seems to be recent.

@George - I thought people were annoyed with Pharmaceutical lobbying because it tended to work against the best interests of the people who need healthcare. Though feel free to correct me, I'm not American.

Quote: "Why not blame the lawmakers who are so susceptible to lobbying. They’re the ones who have an explicit duty to the public."

No they don't, or at least they don't appear to feel that way very often. They are certainly worthy of part of the blame, however.

Lawmakers tend to feel that they have an explicit duty to those who donated buckets of cash to their campaigns to help them get elected. That money is used in PR and marketing the candidate to the voters, and media exposure seems to be correlated in most cases with being elected. "The people" are an incidental annoyance to this process, apparently.

And if it's hard to develop a new drug and get it to market, that is probably a good thing as it reduces the probability of another Thalidomide, Vioxx, Zelnorm, etc. etc. I also wonder how much money is spent on marketing, both directly with all those "Ask your doctor if [insert new drug here] is right for you!" and indirectly through wining and dining the right people, etc..

Most people don't need a "brand"-new super drug; most people just need access to affordable medicine and pain relief that involve drugs that have been around for a long time and so don't require expensive R&D and are already FDA approved but just aren't that profitable.

A very small percentage of money is actually spent on research and development. The majority of the money is spent on advertising. The rest goes to lobbying and profits. Most of the basic sciences research that drug companies start with comes from govt funded university researchers. Then a drug is developed, patented, marketed along with the disease (because you can make so much more money if everyone thinks they have it). And reformulated right before the patent runs out. Actually very few drugs are actually new ones that we might need. Most are re-formulated old ones, dealing with a side effect or two, to put out just before the patent runs out on the one it is replacing.

Lindsay, you are exactly right. Nothing the pharmaceutical companies do is in the best interest of us.

Also, the U.S. is one of only a few countries that allows direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies..

Ironic that corporate charters are the financial equivalent of cancer when pharmaceutical companies are supposed to be helping in the fight against cancer (limitless growth is the purpose of a corporation, and if it happens inside a body we call that a tumor).

Almost by definition the for-profit pharmaceutical companies cannot have human health as a goal. To do so would be to bankrupt themselves because their primary directive (according to corporate charters) is growth, growth, growth in order to satisfy the shareholders, not the sick 'consumers' of their 'products'. That is a criminal level of conflict of interest, and it's one that history will judge very harshly.

I don't begrudge anyone who makes money from creating something people need or want, but I do have a problem with a vested interest in disease rather than health. Nothing substantive will change until that fundamental flaw in the healthcare system is fixed.