Big pharma likes to blame everyone but themselves. They claim its all about the big R&D expenses.
But they cannot do direct-to-the-consumer advertising in either the EU or Japan, yet they sell about $500 billion worth of drugs there, while spending $10 billion here on TV advertising alone.
We have a population about 110 million less than the EU, but we spend about $200 billion more annually on medicinal drugs than they do. Is it medically worth it?? How much of it is waste generated by all the direct-to-the-consumer tv ads??
A lot of the drugs are for simple maladies that can be handled with over the counter medicine.