How Pharmaceutical Companies Control the Health Care Industry

Interest Group in Healthcare

In the article by Boggs (2006) on the role that “Big Pharma”—the pharmaceutical industry—plays in serving as an interest group in healthcare, the author reviews several books on the subject and concludes that this interest group is exploiting modern American medicine, law, and capitalist systems to its advantage. It highlights for instance how the trade association PhRMA is one of the largest interest groups in Washington, DC, and how it uses its influence and money to lobby for regulations that would help rather than harm Big Pharma. It is a relationship that does not speak well of either the drug industry or the healthcare industry, as Boggs (2006) exposes a quid pro quo type of relationship in which profits are put before patients.

Boggs (2006) explains that in the United States, the health care industry is a for-profit business. One way that profits are put before patients is in the form of lobbying by special interests groups, such as Big Pharma (various drug companies that band together in groups like PhRMA). Big Pharma as a whole lobbies for regulations that benefit the drug companies rather than patients. For example, the FDA requires a generic version of a drug to be proven equivalent to the brand-name version before it can be sold. However, this process is long and expensive, so most generics never make it to market. As a result, patients are forced to pay high prices for brand-name drugs, even when cheaper alternatives are available.

Big Pharma also manufactures many of the drugs used to treat chronic conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes. These drugs are essential for patients, but they are also very profitable for drug companies. As a result, drug companies have little incentive to develop new treatments or cures for these conditions. Instead, they focus on marketing existing drugs and finding new uses for them. This profit-driven approach to health care often means that patients are treated as consumers rather than as sick people in need of medical care (Boggs, 2006; Walters, 2018).

But there is another aspect to the problem as well, which Boggs (2006) explores: it is the notion that too many health care practitioners are beholden to drug companies—so much so that the health care physicians and providers are apt to overprescribe drugs to patients even when they are not necessarily needed or warranted. In other words, people are being prescribed drugs because Big Pharma wants to sell what it produces and make a lot of money; it has nothing necessarily to do with the health of patients (Boggs, 2006). Big Pharma as an interest group uses its position and clout in Washington to keep regulators off its back—because as was seen with the opioid epidemic, Big Pharma has a big part to play in America’s drug addiction. Yet few companies are held accountable, as the interest group is able to keep Congress from permitting the public to put too much pressure on the industry.

The end result of all this is that Big Pharma essentially ends up running the healthcare industry, especially when it comes to the FDA’s oversight of what drugs are allowed to be brought to market and what drugs are not; what is considered safe (like emergency vaccines, for instance) and what is not. These companies are shown by Boggs (2006) to be far more interested in making money for investors and stakeholders than in helping people or putting their actual health needs first. If the country’s healthcare industry actually promoted health literacy and preventive medicine, the influence of Big Pharma would likely drop substantially—but it does not; instead it promotes drug interventions because of the power and influence Big Pharma wields.