Description
The pharmaceutical industry has turned out one wonder drug after another in the last two decades โ drugs that reduce cholesterol, protect organ transplants from rejection, heal ulcers, shrink prostate glands, ease depression โ even drugs that shut off heart attacks. Wonderful drugs โ if you can afford them. A growing number of Americans cannot. The prices are just too high.
Prescription drug prices rose three times faster than inflation in the last decade, making the drug industry the nation's most profitable business. In Making Medicine, Making Money, investigative reporters Donald Drake and Marian Uhlman show how the industry has circumvented every governmental effort to bring prices under control; how drug companies raise prices, not lower them, when faced with competition; how they are granted monopoly markets and given the right to profit from research breakthroughs by government and academic scientists โ and then often slap premium prices on the drugs developed through taxpayer-funded research.
