Plus there’s all those legal bills and payouts when the class action lawsuits come five years after the drug goes on the market.
Don’t forget the 1:1 big pharma lobbyists to congress critter ratio. In some cases it’s 3:1 shelling out vacations, dinners, gifts, promises of board seats and employment post grifting, I mean post their term in congress. Basically WE are paying the bribes that big pharma uses to get crazy high prices. Maybe if new drugs weren’t so profitable we wouldn’t get all these new disorders that need a new drug to treat them.
Roughly 1/3 of all pharma drugs are removed because of issues not discovered until they have been in use for over five years.
Zantac is an example of this. Millions were taking it for acid indigestion. Including me. It had been out for ten years. It was an over the counter medicine that was removed because of problems.