Americans are getting ripped off when paying for their prescription drugs. Not only do we have the highest prices in the world, but when you add in the fact that your tax dollars already paid for the drugs, you get a clear picture of how badly you’re being ripped off. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Mike Papantonio: Americans are getting ripped off when paying for their prescription drugs. Not only do we have the highest prices in the world, but when you add in the fact that your tax dollars already paid for the drug, that you had a clear picture of how bad you’re being ripped off when you understand those kinds of numbers. Look, let’s begin at the beginning. NIH pays for most all of this drug research. Okay. The companies like Pfizer and Merck, they come in and they get that free information from NIH that taxpayers have paid for. They come up with a new drug. The list is startling. We’ll put it up for everybody to see. But when you look at the list of drugs and what taxpayers paid through the NIH and other, colleges, universities, it’s startling. Pick it up.

Farron Cousins: Yeah. What we have here in the United States through the NIH and the money that they dole out is the National Institute of Health will typically say, okay, you’ve got a university group of professors that are working on a new diabetes drug. They’ve got all this research. They’ve done the papers. Let’s give them a big old grant so that they can start this and develop this drug. And then the researchers, the scientists, they do this. And then the pharmaceutical company comes in and says, hey, wow, you got a great thing here. Uh, we’re gonna buy this from you and your university. Your university’s gonna get a lot of money. We’re gonna hold the patent and we just have a couple fine tuning to do. We’ll spend $10 million on top of the hundred million you’ve spent, and we’re good to go. And they profit in the billions from it. But like you just said, we already paid for those drugs. My tax dollars, your tax dollars. We paid for that already.

Mike Papantonio: Let’s talk about the 10 drugs that are being reviewed, where the industry, the drug industry has gone apoplectic, 10 drugs. We’re only talking about 10 drugs. And in those 10 drugs, taxpayers spent of just those 10 drugs, taxpayers spent almost $12 billion, $12 billion, taxpayers paid to develop those drugs. And big pharma made 70 to $80 billion off of those drugs that taxpayers paid for. And then they, in there, they jacked up prices sometimes as high as 2000% on those same drugs that taxpayers paid for at NIH. Drug Company comes in, acquires the drug, costs taxpayers $12 billion, industry makes $70 billion. Nobody’s doing anything about it. Nobody. It’s just like, okay, no problem. And if you follow this story, Stelara, for example, the drug Stelara. Stelara, a dose of Stelara in the United States is.

Farron Cousins: Well, $16,000 in the US. Yeah.

Mike Papantonio: $16,000 a dose of Stelara. In the UK it’s $2,500. What? Talk about it.

Farron Cousins: It’s absurd. And you’ve pointed this out because you actually asked this in a deposition one time, you were over in Europe taking the deposition of a drug executive. And you asked him, well, just real quick, why are you charging only this small amount over here, and yet you charge 10 times as much in the US? And the response was, well, because we can.

Mike Papantonio: We can, it literally was, we do that because we can. And it seemed to be okay. Everybody said, oh, all right. Well, that’s just how we do business in the United States. But I think it’s important that people understand that. That they understand that this is what’s happening in the United States. We’ll put a list of these drugs, Stelara, Stelara medicine that cost taxpayers six point, almost seven, well, $6.5 billion. Enbrel, $2.6 billion for taxpayers. Entresto, $901 million cost. And that’s not even, there’s still no no give from the industry to say, well, we’ll give you good prices. No, they won’t give us good prices, you know.

Farron Cousins: And the reason we’re paying so much more is not just because they can, it’s because they have to recoup what they’re spending in advertising. Because they are spending billions and billions every year. I mean, if you watch primetime network TV.

Mike Papantonio: Oh, it’s disgusting.

Farron Cousins: And it’s the people happy, dancing. We’re taking this miracle pill and it’s all these horrible side effects coming across too. But look at how happy we are.

Mike Papantonio: We are so happy.

Farron Cousins: And they’re distracting you while they read the side effects.

Mike Papantonio: This drug, yes, it killed 150 people from heart failure. But we’re so happy about it. This drug, well, it shut down people’s liver. These are actually cases we’ve handled. Shut down people’s liver, a thousand people. But we’re so happy about it. These same people are advertising on television, acting like everything’s okay because we let ’em do it. New Zealand is the only other place in the world that allows that kind of advertising, by the way.