As the government begins its first-ever price negotiations for a handful of medicines under Medicare, the pharmaceutical industry has launched an all-out legal and PR assault on this meager attempt to control out-of-control drug prices for the country’s most vulnerable. Big Pharma reasons that the government has no place setting prices for the drugs developed by private companies.

But the government, and by extension taxpayers, heavily subsidizes the development of drugs in this country. Now a bombshell new report reveals that Americans funded the development of all ten drugs up for price negotiations, shelling out a total of $11.7 billion on their research. In 2022 alone, Big Pharma made $70 billion selling those same drugs — and now it wants to keep their prices sky high.

According to the new study out of the Center for Integration of Science and Industry at Bentley University, which has not yet been published, the ten selected prescription drugs received anywhere from $227 million to $6.5 billion in funding from the government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) for crucial, foundational research.