Americans Pay At Least DOUBLE What Other Countries Pay For Prescriptions

A shocking new report from Public Citizen has found that, on average, Americans are paying nearly double for their prescription drugs as other wealthy nations. This is due to several factors, the most obvious being that our government doesn't negotiate drug prices even though we publicly fund the majority of the research and development that drug companies use to make medicine. Farron Cousins explains why Americans are paying so much more than other countries.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Recently public advocacy group, public citizen published a report showing that here in the United States, we are paying on average, roughly double for our prescription drugs than the rest of the industrialized world. Very simple us sales of the top 20 medications totaled 101 billion in 2020 while cells of the same drugs totaled 57 billion for the rest of the world, the rest of the world. And it is due primarily to the fact that again, we're paying pretty much double at least by the way as everybody else, because that's the way the system is designed here in the United States. Most of these major drug manufacturers, not necessarily based in the United States, but they all have a base of operations here in the United States. There's plenty of them based in Europe, but they also operate in the United States with offices here, research and development, and of course laboratories. And they do that because they know that here in the United States, we're going to federally fund most of their research and development.

I think it's about 75% of the research and development is actually funded with our tax dollars. And then they take that either the money goes directly to the, you know, pharmaceutical labs. They use our money to do the research, or it's done actually at the university level. You have the universities doing all of this. And then of course the pharmaceutical company step in and say, Hey, that's pretty awesome. We're going to buy that from you either way. We're paying for it. And we're getting screwed out of it because then they patent those drugs. They get phenomenal, you know, decade long patents on this to prevent any kind of generics from entering the market. And if they want to keep generics out of the market for even longer, they'll make slight tweaks to the drugs. Once they hit that close to that 10 year, mark renew the patent for another 10 years, and then we get screwed again because they're charging us 2000% more than it costs to make it sometimes 15000% more.

And for a select few drugs here in the United States, the markup is over 200000% of what it costs them to make it another major factor as to why we're getting screwed on drug prices is because our government doesn't negotiate prices. We're not allowed to do it. I think the VA can do it actually to a little, little extent. And course right now we're fighting for Medicare to be able to do that. And, uh, the corporate is Democrats who are being funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Aren't aren't letting us get that, but not being able to negotiate drug pies, prices like other countries. Yeah. We're kind of screwed there. Another big thing. The reason we pay a lot of money here is because even though they're not recouping necessarily R and D costs, they have to recoup those direct to consumer advertising costs. We are one of two countries on the planet.

The other, I believe is New Zealand that actually even allows that you go over to Europe, you go to Canada, you go to south America, you go to Africa, you go to Asia, there's no pharmaceutical marketing out there except maybe of course for over the counter ibuprofen or Tylenol, but you're not going to see drug, uh, drug ads for, for Lipitor or Zell Jans, or any of those other drugs that you see on your TV. Non-stop all day, every day. And that's the big cost that these pharmaceutical companies incur. They spend more money annually on direct to consumer advertising than they do on research and development. And those who do fund their own research and development, um, analysis has shown that they were cooped the full cost of everything with their drug, developing it and marketing it within the first two years within the first two years after that, nothing but profit and we're the ones getting screwed. And as I always like to say, we pay for our drugs twice. We pay for them through our tax dollars. And of course we pay for them when we go to the pharmacy. And when we go to the pharmacy, according to this new report from public citizen, we're paying on average, at least double what the rest of the planet pays for the same drug.