Big pharma has been a hot button topic for some time in the United States. The costs of medications can make obtaining easily affordable healthcare for the masses difficult to say the least. Many other countries cap the costs of pharmaceuticals such as Spain, South Korea and the UK, while the US continues to allow pharmaceutical companies to set the price point presumably to allow innovation (Keyhani, et al., 2010). In the study written by Keyhani, et al., they analyze 288 new drugs developed in more than 20 different countries. What they found was interesting in that pharmaceutical innovation that stemmed from the US was proportional to its spending on prescription drugs. Other countries with direct price control were found to have proportionally more innovation when compared to their own prescription drug spending (Keyhani, et al., 2010). Take-away: price controlled countries produce proportionally more new drugs at a cheaper cost to their patients compared to the United States where there is no price control.
Keyhani, S., Wang, S., Hebert, P., Carpenter, D., & Anderson, G. (2010). US pharmaceutical innovation in an international context. American journal of public health, 100(6), 1075–1080. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2009.178491
Discuss the development of new drugs in the United States as compared to other countries and evaluate the pharmacoeconomic issues that lead to high prescription costs in the United States.