Three drug manufacturing execs get raked over the coals by Bernie Sanders!

[thewayne]

Ah, I love Bernie! Would like to move to his state to vote for him.

Anyway, he's the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. And he called in the CEOs of: Merck, Johnson & Johnson, and Bristol Meyers.

The pharmacy manufacturers like to claim that it's the pharmacy benefit manager middlemen that make drugs so expensive, along with the cost of R&D. Well, not so fast!

Seems that a Senate investigation turned out that they are spending more on executive enrichment and stock buybacks than R&D!

LUCY! You have some 'splainin' to do!

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/big-pharma-spends-billions-more-on-executives-and-stockholders-than-on-rd/

Comments

[silveradept]

I'm not surprised that the investigation turned up that most of the profit was being used for executives and stock buybacks. After all, apart from Medicare, there's no entity in the U.S. that can actually push back against arbitrary pricing and force costs down, and there's not nearly enough people in Congress who would put in place laws that would require health care to operate more like a non-profit or be required to prove they spent almost all of their money on actual health care instead of making people rich.