Pharma has also become inefficient!
Despite spending $50 billion a year on research and development, Pharma's new drugs are less effective than drugs developed 40 years ago.
Bad news has reached consumers. The drugs don't work. Or, they don't work as well as they used to. Despite exorbitant prices for new drugs, and despite claims of expensive R&D efforts driving up prices, the fact remains that new drugs cost more and do less.
Research published on Monday 6 June showed that the effectiveness of new drugs, comparing patients' response to those treatments to those taking a placebo, plummeted from 1970 onwards.
The new study in the journal Health Affairs looked at 315 clinical trials comparing a drug with a placebo and were published in four of the world's top medical journals (BMJ, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine). from 1966 to 2010. Medicines encompass the full range of human diseases: cardiovascular diseases and infections to cancer, mental disorders and respiratory diseases.
In the early years, the drugs easily beat placebos: They were, on average, 4.5 times more effective, where effectiveness means how well they lowered blood pressure, conquered cancers, relieved depression, or did whatever else they were at. intended.
But the trend line is inexorably downward, Dr Mark Olfson of Columbia University and statistician Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania have found. Since 1980 the drugs were less than four times as good, since 1990, twice as good, and since 2000 only 36 percent have been shown to be better than placebo. Since older drugs were much more effective than placebos, and newer ones only slightly, this means that older drugs have generally been more effective than newer ones.
If this disappointing (if somewhat surprising) news hasn't turned out to be bad enough for the industry, many people have developed a wariness of the switch to the National Health Plan which will make this all the worse.
The law established an independent research institute to compare the effectiveness of different treatments for the same condition. This way, patients as well as private insurers and government programs like Medicare can stop paying for less effective therapies. If the new analysis is correct, then "comparative research" could conclude that older drugs, which are more likely to be generics, are better than the expensive new brands that provide the bulk of the profits for drug companies.
Well, that part is good news for consumers, or at least for beneficiaries of the new health plan. If the most effective drug is also the cheapest… virtually everyone wins. The pharmaceutical companies will not be happy, but this is really their fault. I often propose
