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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (262250)	4/22/2008 2:58:39 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

drug companies can choose to not peddle their wares to Medicare Which means selling very few drugs to elderly people, the group that is the biggest market. Its true that not every elderly person is in Part D, but many are and the percentage is growing. If a drug company couldn't sell in California, would your argument be "well there are 49 other states, they aren't really restricted". Drug companies pay less for R&D than they do for marketing and advertising. Only when you consider free samples to be marketing and advertising, and only if you give a fairly large value to those samples rather than the actual incremental cost to produce them. Also only if you don't count the cost of testing as part of the cost of developing a drug. But even if marketing was really a higher cost than R&D, it wouldn't change the fact that a lower expected return of an investment in R&D would bring less R&D.