I'm not going to spend the time hunting up the $60-70 million story, but this along with others, was not hard to find. ( Google: drug development cost )
Drug prices in the United States are out of control, and rising.
http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2002/000118.html "The Tufts-industry estimate is for the cost of new chemical entities for which the industry was wholly responsible -- that is, where there was no substantial public contribution to R&D.
It turns out, however, that the vast majority of new drugs Big Pharma brings to market do not involve new chemical compounds. A May 2002 study by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation found that two-thirds of the prescription drugs approved by the FDA between 1989 and 2000 were modified versions of existing medicines or identical to drugs already on the market (and only about 15 percent were both new and deemed by the FDA to provide significant improvement over existing medicines). Pharma denies it, but there is every reason to believe these less novel products are far cheaper to bring to market.
Then there's the not insignificant fact that the case of drugs brought to market without government support is the exception, not the norm. The federal government supports an enormous amount of research, and funds the earliest and riskiest portions of the R&D process: basic research and the earlier phases of clinical trials.
Finally, the Tufts-industry figures seem to wildly inflate the cost of clinical testing. Looking at company filings with the IRS for tax credits on research for "orphan drugs" (drugs which treat small populations), however, the Consumer Project on Technology found that --
adjusted for risk -- drug companies report expenditures of only $7.9 million on clinical trials, less than 1 percent of the overall estimate.
Even if the costs for this category of drug are below average, as the industry claims -- even if they were, implausibly, a tenth of the average -- this would still suggest a much lower total development cost than the Tufts-industry estimate."
Pharma denies it, but there is every reason to believe these less novel products are far cheaper to bring to market. Less novel products are a safer bet to develop since they are a bit less apt to have surprise toxicities. But any chemical change at all is defined as a new chemical entity (it will have different chemical precursors, and a different route of synthesis) that must go through all the same toxicity and clinical tests. And these are by far more expensive than the basic research the government supports that you and others have been led to believe is such a big part of the equation. And more often than you might believe, adding one methyl group to an old compound, which is about the simplest modification you can make, can at the end of 3-4 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of studies, prove to have been a toxic or tumorigenic modification.
If you could force current drug prices down by 50%, which is what the trips to Canada and Mexico make you think can be done, you could say goodbye to anything remotely close to the current level of bringing innovative new medicines to market, and I suspect most who are complaining about prices would still be complaining.
And yes, I agree that it is very difficult or impossible for some of the elderly to afford prescription drugs. But consider that they have probably never paid anything to insurance during the years they did not need the drugs. Doesn't matter if that is not their fault. The only way that kind of insurance, or almost any kind of insurance, can work is if you pay for it long before you need it. So we must resign ourselves I suppose to the Federal government taking the responsibility. Thats what happens when we (collectively) do not plan ahead