{"id":885,"date":"2004-12-29T00:02:32","date_gmt":"2004-12-29T00:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=885"},"modified":"2004-12-29T00:02:32","modified_gmt":"2004-12-29T00:02:32","slug":"hi_prices_how_t","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=885","title":{"rendered":"High Prices: How to Think About Prescription Drugs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Malcolm Gladwell <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gladwell.com\/2004\/2004_10_25_a_drugs.html\">pens a very useful look<\/a> at prescription drug costs:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>In the political uproar over prescription-drug costs, Nexium has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge&#8211;and the extraordinary profits they enjoy&#8211;by arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines is risky and expensive. But Nexium is little more than a repackaged version of an old medicine. And the hundred and twenty dollars a month that AstraZeneca charges isn&#8217;t to recoup the costs of risky research and development; the costs were for a series of clinical trials that told us nothing we needed to know, and a half-billion-dollar marketing campaign selling the solution to a problem we&#8217;d already solved. &#8220;The Prilosec pattern, repeated across the pharmaceutical industry, goes a long way to explain why the nation&#8217;s prescription drug bill is rising an estimated 17 % a year even as general inflation is quiescent,&#8221; the Wall Street Journal concluded, in a front-page article that first revealed the Shark Fin Project.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Malcolm Gladwell pens a very useful look at prescription drug costs: In the political uproar over prescription-drug costs, Nexium has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with the pharmaceutical industry. The big drug companies justify the high prices they charge&#8211;and the extraordinary profits they enjoy&#8211;by arguing that the search for innovative, life-saving medicines [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}