The UNC School of Journalism reports statistics from a study that examined how the media handles stories related to prescription drugs. From 132 newscasts aired on ABC, NBC, and CBS, the Business & Media Institute found that 80% of the stories excluded the industry perspective altogether, not even asking the company for a statement on matters directly relating to their product.
The specific findings, as summarized by the UNC Journalism blog, were:
Media Overemphasize Cost to Consumer: The broadcast networks mentioned costs to consumers or drug company revenues 11 times more often than they mentioned drug development costs.
Networks Leave Companies Unnoticed: Only 22 percent of the stories even named the company that developed the drug or drugs featured in the story.
What Development Costs?: A mere 2 percent of stories dealt with the cost of developing drugs, and even those costs were downplayed by industry skeptics.
Special Treatment for Left-Wing Causes: Nineteen stories focused on drugs that were popular liberal causes such as the morning-after pill or HPV vaccine Gardasil. The networks didn’t apply the same scrutiny to those drugs and their makers as they did to others.
I’m not really a fan of pharmaceutical companies in general due to their extremely annoying ads (although that’s really more of an issue with the people who respond to the commercials and ads, which encourages their endless rotation; the companies are simply doing what gets results). However, it’s a basic tenet of Journalism 101 to not completely ignore a company directly involved in a story– and the fact that drug development costs were universally forgotten isn’t surprising, I guess, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous.
The fact is that these drugs are incredibly expensive to bring to market (due not just to R&D costs, but to the FDA’s byzantine requirements as well), and until that’s rectified, the billions a company spent to create and test a drug shouldn’t be completely ignored in news coverage.
I’m reminded of the exchange between John McCain and Mitt Romney that took place at one of the Republican debates in January:
MCCAIN: … have sued the pharmaceutical companies because of overcharging of millions of dollars of Medicaid costs to their patients.
MCCAIN: How could that happen? How could pharmaceutical companies be able to cover up the cost to the point where nobody knows? Why shouldn’t we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?
It’s because of the power of the pharmaceutical companies. We should have pharmaceutical companies competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients.
ROMNEY: OK, don’t leave me. Don’t send the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys.
MCCAIN: Well, they are.
ROMNEY: No, actually they’re trying to create products to make us well and make us better, and they’re doing the work of the free market.
And are there excesses? I’m sure there are, and we should go after excesses. But they’re an important industry to this country.But let me note something else, and that is the market will work. And the reason health care isn’t working like a market right now is you have 47 million people that are saying, “I’m not going to play. I’m just going to get free care paid for by everybody else.” That doesn’t work.
Number two, the buyer doesn’t have information about what the cost or quality is, or different choices they could have. If you take the government out of it to a much greater extent, you’d get it to work like a market and it will rein in cost.
Romney lost a lot of people who were watching this debate with me when he became so outraged at the mere thought of blaming something on the pharmaceutical companies or making them into the “big bad guys.” He actually didn’t just lose the home audience, he horrified them. He was correct that we get lifesaving drugs from the pharma companies, but Romney isn’t right when he says that Big Pharma is beyond reproach– a key aspect of a free society is that we can criticize companies that bring us life-saving products if we want to, whether our criticism is justified or not (and someone can criticize us for doing that, and we can criticize them for criticizing us, and so on).
It was more Romney’s attitude that was misguided rather than his words, though, because his follow-up was dead-on: if the free market was at work, Big Pharma wouldn’t be able to be the “big bad guys” and they would be “competing to take care of our Medicare and Medicaid patients,” because those patients would be part of the free market (which they now are not) and because other pharma companies would have a chance to get their drugs passed by the FDA (as of now, small guys like Cortex Pharmaceuticals don’t have a hope in hell of that happening because they can’t work the system of the FDA).
Romney just didn’t take it far enough. It’s not just that uninsured people may show up at the emergency room and expect treatment when they need it, it’s also a huge problem that 40% of health care costs in the United States are paid by the government. When government gets involved, prices go up and quality goes down. Why wouldn’t the pharmaceutical companies try to overcharge the government? Everyone else does and gets away with it, and the government is usually very willing to part with its non-hard-earned money. While McCain is so worried about American taxpayers being ripped off by corporations, let’s ask him about the various cases of massive fraud conducted by private contractors in Iraq. Since he wants us to stay in Iraq for 100 more years, we might as well start fixing the snafus now, right?
Tags: prescription drugs, drugs in the media, prescription drugs media, drug industry media, John McCain Big Pharma, John McCain drug companies, John McCain pharmaceutical companies, Mitt Romney Big Pharma, Mitt Romney drug companies, Mitt Romney pharmaceutical companies
My classMate who works as a Custodian presented to me your reports here. We hunted for some more statistics that told us many more things , Thanks
Leroy
March 22nd, 2008