The Medicine Business

Drugs & Money - Bloomberg

Zerohedge points to this story:

Is Modern Medicine a Sham? by Attorney Bobbie Anne Cox

Wherein I found this paragraph:

Did you know that the largest lobby we have in the United States is the pharmaceutical industry? It is the largest, by a long shot, as it solidly towers over all of the others. Let me share some numbers with you. Pharma spends approximately $380,000,000 (three hundred eighty million) every year lobbying Congress. To give you some perspective, the second largest lobby industry in our nation is the electronics manufacturing industry, and it spends about $250,000,000 million a year lobbying Congress. The third largest is the insurance industry which spends about $150,000,000 million a year lobbying Congress. All the other industries that lobby simply pale in comparison. These statistics alone reveal so much.

$380 million is almost $1 million per congress critter, which is roughly the same amount we spend to put an infantry man on the front lines for one year in one of our foreign wars.

All this noise about money and medicine is mostly just that - noise. The more noise, the less room for rational thought.

Drugs can be amazing. There are many drugs that are very effective at curing, or at least alleviating the symptoms of, a disease. Problem is that people come in a variety of flavors and no matter how well a drug works for most people, there are going to be people for whom this drug is ineffective, or worse yet, causes an adverse reaction.

How much do we spend on drugs? Google knows:

• The United States has the highest per capita prescription drug spending among comparable nations, averaging $1,432 per person in 2021.
• Total spending on prescription drugs in the US reached $378 billion in 2021, making up almost 9% of healthcare spending and over 1.6% of the nation's gross domestic product.

So the lobbying expense is one-tenth of one percent of the total revenue.