3 March 2019 - It’s not often that the Trump administration and the anti-poverty NGO Oxfam find themselves singing from the same hymn sheet. (Of course, both have suffered reputational harm from sex scandals.) 

But they’ve found themselves making the same big-picture point recently: medicines are too damn expensive. And a key part of the problem is the lack of consistent information about drug pricing.

It’s a myth that the costs of medicines need to be high, to cover the research & development costs of pharmaceutical companies. Research shows that profits are much higher than necessary to justify past and future R&D, the pharma industry has one of the highest profit margins around, and the industry spends almost twice as much on marketing as on R&D. Plus, taxpayers are essentially subsidizing these companies through the public grants that go to universities and NGOs, though the profits don’t flow back to them.

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