I considered the quip an acknowledgment that lifesaving discoveries were worth the money.PharmaMan, they called me.
I was proud of being a Pharma Man.
Alas, I have now slipped precipitously in their eyes.
Prescription drugs next to a pill bottle.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
My onetime champions have grudgingly tolerated this collective subjugation for years.
Their festering anger has now broken into an open rebellion against the Pharma Man, the benevolent oppressor.
But Mr. Trump has outshouted them all.
But the Pharma Man has earned this new reputation, and then some.
Nothing has been as devastating to the industrys image as the ongoing opioid crisis.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died because companies capriciously pushed sales of the addictive painkillers.
But you would never know all this from their public reputation.
Professionally, the Pharma Man ranks below the car salesman for honesty and ethics.
Thats like possessing Tolkiens One Ring, which gives the possessor unassailable power to rule over and dominate others.
We set the price we want.
We can cast our spell on doctors to prescribe our medicine and do our bidding.
We can banish competitors who attempt to lay claim to our Ring of Power.
This underpinning of the industrys colossal machinery is rigged against the patient.
We refuse to see how our customers see our business.
Our customers turn to us to help them deal with these events of life and living.
They are the ones who help create the market for the drug.
And to dangle it in front of them but out of their reach by charging unaffordable prices is unconscionable.
We also should not ignore the fact that the U.S. government helps out drug development with taxpayer dollars.
But when it comes to drugs, the consumer doesnt necessarily have alternative choices.
Take, for instance, the cholesterol-lowering drugs, known as statins.
Each statin has its own distinct efficacy and side effects, even though they all lower cholesterol.
Physicians prescribe one statin or another based on patient condition and the desired outcome.
We are known to shamelessly exploit these monopolistic powers.
Some of our tactics are simply mean.
The indented mark would allow the tablet to be evenly split into two halves.
The two-in-one becomes the new fashion.
We justify the constant push for ever more profit by pointing to the nature of our business.
Most drugs in development dont make it.
We do not publish independently audited numbers to substantiate our claims.
Many of our single pills, if incorporated into a company, would rank among the Fortune 500 companies.
Investors bet on our drugs long before they reach the market.
They swarm medical and scientific conferences where the latest findings and opinions about a drugs progress are presented.
But these prescribers we rely on to do our bidding with patients have lost public trust.
Nearly all Big Pharma companies have paid fines, some multiple times, to settle charges of bribing doctors.
But there is a website devoted to exposing and shaming both parties.
The site is the brainchild of ProPublica.
Who decides the price?
These middlemen buy drugs on behalf of government and private employers and insurance companies.
They negotiate prices with the pharma companies.
Even Medicare, the countrys largest health plan, covering 60 million Americans, cant.
Their discovery didnt come easy.
I would respond that the prices reflected the cost of innovation, but that they could be lower.
That conditional justification is harder to make these days.
More than 80 percent of the prescription drugs sold in the U.S. are generics, copies of patent-expired drugs.
As copies, they have very low development costs.
Their main costs lie in raw materials and manufacturing.
And that cost is a fraction of the price the consumer currently pays for generics.
I should know, because I manufacture many of them.
Even after adding the cost of marketing and distribution, the selling prices of these drugs are astronomical.
Meanwhile, many government actions are in the works to limit prices of drugs across the board.
Alas, none has emerged we can hold up as an example.
A Jeff Bezos would recast the industry by tossing out the middlemen and corruptible medical professionals.
That would make the Pharma Man proud.
