HEALTHCARE & SOCIAL MEDIA

PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America along with the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, or BIO have launched a campaign targeting lawmakers who are trying to legislate away its profit party. 

The PhRMA/BIO campaign profiles patients whose lives were all saved or lengthened by Pharma medicines. Like “Ask Your Doctor,” DTC ads, the videos are full of puppies, sunsets and People Just Like You. We get to meet “Theresa,” diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 57, “Hydeia” suffering from HIV/AIDS at 31, “Charis” suffering from ankylosing spondylitis at 29 and “Henry” suffering from glutaric acidemia Type 1 at the young age of three. In one video, a voice over asks, “how do we place value” on “Another decade with a spouse. A few more years with your best friend. A rich, full life rather than one cut short.” Hold on to your wallets. The campaign even claims high-priced meds help the economy by creating jobs, like for “sheet metal workers.” Right.

Of course no one wishes the patients ill, but the campaign’s message is if you question Big Pharma’s high prices, you do.  The stories imply that regulation of Pharma prices would threaten the patients’ lives by jeopardizing “research.” But according to Public Citizen and other sources, Pharma’s actual research is only one-fifth of what it claims.

Nowhere in the new PhRMA PR campaign are the actual drug costs mentioned like the 12 cancer drugs that cost above $100,000 a year though many do not clearly even extend life. It is nowhere mentioned that a year on a cocktail of psychiatric drugs can easily cost $60,000. Instead of addressing prices, the tear-jerker campaign focuses on rare diseases and cancers that presumably will not be cured if lawmakers curtail Big Pharma profits.

Parading sick patients in front of the FDA and state officials who decide drug reimbursements is how Pharma has managed to get so many five and six digit a year drugs approved in the first place. Co-opted patients, sometimes called Astroturf because they are not really grassroots, “appear before public and consumer panels, contact lawmakers, and provide media outlets a human face to attach to a cause,” writes Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times, “when insurers balk at reimbursing patients for new prescription medications.”

Certainly everyone’s heart goes out to “Amy” in the new Pharma campaign who says her “lungs collapsed and stomach burst during a surgical procedure” a week before her senior prom and she “slipped into a coma and didn’t wake until months later.” Everyone is happy that Amy is “soon starring in a local musical.” But how many of us are at risk of such extreme bad medical luck before our prom? And more importantly, is such a rare medical occurrence a justification for six digit drug prices?