Drug costs and medical research

The pharmaceutical industry claims that the high cost of drugs in America is necessary to support the costs of research, but a more likely cause of those costs is in the NYTimes article which says “[t]he drug industry has long spent billions of dollars annually – far more than it spends on research – trying to persuade doctors to prescribe its pills.”

This is a model that is not working. Far better is for medical research to be done by universities and the results to be made available without patent restrictions for manufacturors to compete in the market.