Even More!! Reasons to Vote Republican in 2004

(or, Why I'm Voting Democrat in 2004)

Scroll Down For Related Links

 While families struggle to pay for medicine and deal with an increasingly bleak economic picture, drug makers prosper.

Taxol—a very important cancer drug...was developed almost entirely at the National Cancer Institute over some 30 years at a cost to taxpayers of $183 million. It was then synthesized by NIH-funded researchers at Florida State University.

Yet, after Bristol-Myers Squibb was given exclusive rights to the drug through an agreement with NIH, the company priced it at $10,000 to $20,000 for a year’s treatment. Hardly "reasonable terms." Up to last year, the company had paid royalties to NIH of only $35 million on its $9 billion in sales of Taxol.

Research and development (R&D) is a relatively small part of the budgets of the big drug companies—dwarfed by their vast expenditures on marketing and administration, and smaller even than profits.

(The) major pharmaceutical industry -- whose top ten companies make more in profits than the rest of the Fortune 500 combined

Five out of the top nine pharmaceutical companies are NOT AMERICAN.  GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Aventis, Novartis and Roche are all European companies.  They use research paid for by US taxpayers as the basis for many of their drugs...and then charge exorbitant prices.

For the most part, drug companies are not innovative at all...except in marketing.