A profit, yes, but a profit of 26% to 50% https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2010/industries/21/index.html
of all company revenue isn’t a “profit”- it used to be called “highway robbery”. Any industry would kill- no pun intended -to have that profit margin. Drug companies don’t spend anywhere near 25% of sales on research. Big pharma lies as much as big tobacco ever has and, like tobacco companies, gets away with it. They grossly inflate their R&D costs because it’s a great tax deduction.
With that kind of profit, it isn’t risky; it’s the exact opposite of risk, closer to simply printing money.
The link below has links to all of the sources used.
“obtained from a survey of 10 pharmaceutical firms” the
research and development costs of 68 randomly chosen new
drugs and calculated an average cost of $802 million in
2000 dollars. That comes to $1 billion in 2011 dollars
based on the general inflation rate since 2000 (28 percent).
One billion dollars for every little orange prescription
bottle in your medicine cabinet!”
The survey was conducted by a drug maker-back Institute with only 10 pharma's ‘claimed costs’, not actual costs. Unless you believe that everyone of those thousands of medications on the market, many of which are simply “re-licensed” old and existing drugs, costs over one billion dollars each to develop. It does strain credibility, doesn’t it?
The money coming from the American taxpayers’ and, be fair, health insurers’, “pockets” isn’t going to other nations to subsidize their medicines you claim they’re stealing from us, it’s going into the pockets of big pharma.
“When Light and Warburton correct for all these flaws — well, all the ones that can be quantified — they end up with an average cost of bringing a drug to market that’s $59 million and a median cost that’s $43 million. In 2011 dollars, that’s a $75 million average and a $55 million median.
So the drug companies’ $1.32 billion estimate was off, according to Light and Warburton, by only $1.265 billion. * Let’s call it a rounding error.”
Yes, just a little rounding error of well over one billion dollars per medication.
