Big Pharma Is Threatening to Withhold Medicine in Protest of Regulation
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act introduced modest drug pricing restrictions. In response, big pharma companies — which have seen record profits — are threatening to slow the rollout of a lifesaving drug.
Between 2012 and 2021, drug companies spent substantially more on stock buybacks and dividends to reward shareholders than they did on research and development. (Lock Stock / Getty Images)
A Swiss pharmaceutical company announced this month that it could slow-walk bringing a potentially lifesaving drug to market — in order to reduce the time that it could be subject to President Joe Biden’s recently enacted federal price regulations.
Those comments were made by the CEO of Genentech, whose parent company, Roche, has reaped as much as $10 billion from Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, seeing its net income go up by an average of more than 50 percent, while its spending on research and development has increased by just 25 percent.
Pharmaceutical giants like Roche are earning huge sums of money on record-breaking price increases, reporting historic profits — and yet they’re launching an all-out legal, media, and lobbying assault against the modest drug pricing restrictions implemented by Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
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