Drug companies may fill the "villain void" for this administration.
When I entered the business world in the early ‘80s, I never would have predicted that Big Pharma would replace Big Tobacco as the emblem of corporate evil. Back then, drug makers were thought of as scientific boutiques with redeeming social value.
But the time may soon come when working for Big Pharma feels like a cross between working for Philip Morris and the electric company, or some other sharply-regulated public utility. As the Democrats chart their transition to power, with a mandate to reform the healthcare industry, drug companies are planning their own transition to being quarry.
In the immediate future, there will be no political downside to attacking drug companies. They have fallen into the villain void that was created after the massive class action suits against tobacco companies were settled in the 1990s, following a steady drumbeat of awful revelations about how they had hid the risks of their product.
As the Democrats chart their transition to power, drug companies are planning their own transition to being quarry.
The narrative template—Congressional hearings, telltale memos, plaintiff’s lawyers with private jets, telegenic victims—was established; a new corporate villain was needed.
For a while, the target was breast implant manufacturers, but Big Breast lacked both the economic punch and the villain value of Big Tobacco. Big Oil was a reliable Snidely Whiplash, but fossil fuels had been hated for so long that it was hard to rally a posse in the absence of new revelations.
Finance companies, of course, will remain tempting quarry, as will the food and beverage companies ostensibly scheming to make us fat and drunk. But no industry is more directly in the path of the hurricane than pharmaceuticals.
Over the past twenty years, two storm systems gathered momentum around the drug industry and then collided. The first system included the ions of staggering profits, skyrocketing healthcare costs and greater cultural visibility. Thanks in part to “direct to consumer” advertisements, the public became aware of new treatments for once-private problems like erectile dysfuntion and incontinence, while they also read media accounts of some disastrous new products such as Fen-phen. While there are far more good drugs than bad ones, archetypal calamities capture public sentiment the same way that the crash of TWA Flight 800 has greater popular resonance than another safe landing at LaGuardia.
The second climatological phenomenon is the creeping belief that good health is an entitlement and, contrarily, ill health is somehow due to negligence or corruption on somebody’s part, presumably somebody with billions of dollars.
Tracy Quan's latest novel is Diary of a Jetsetting Call Girl, set in Provence and praised in The Nation as a "deft account of occupational rigors and anxieties before the crash." Tracy's debut, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, and the sequel, Diary of a Married Call Girl, are international bestsellers. A regular columnist for The Guardian, she has written for many publications including Cosmopolitan, The Financial Times, and The New York Times.
Joe Mathews is a journalist, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation, and a contributing writer at the Los Angeles Times. He previously served as Justice Department reporter for the Wall Street Journal and as a city desk reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He is the author of The People’s Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy.
Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism (www.posner.com). Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
Renata Espinosa is the New York editor of Fashion Wire Daily. She is also the co-founder of impressionistic fashion and art blog TheNuNu and a sometimes backup dancer for "The Anna Copa Cabanna Show."
Amanda Fortini has written for The New Yorker, Slate, Elle, and New York, among other publications. She lives in Los Angeles.
Eric Dezenhall co-founded the communications firm Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., and serves as its CEO. His first book, Nail 'em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Business, pioneered techniques for understanding and defusing crises.
Eric Dezenhall co-founded the communications firm Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., and serves as its CEO. His first book, Nail 'em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Business, pioneered techniques for understanding and defusing crises.
Eric Dezenhall co-founded the communications firm Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., and serves as its CEO. His first book, Nail 'em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Business, pioneered techniques for understanding and defusing crises.
Eric Dezenhall co-founded the communications firm Dezenhall Resources, Ltd., and serves as its CEO. His first book, Nail 'em!: Confronting High-Profile Attacks on Celebrities and Business, pioneered techniques for understanding and defusing crises.
"less choice, fewer treatments, lousy access to good doctors, delays for important surgical procedures and treatments, and the abandonment of American Innovation and healthcare preeminence"
I've never heard of you, but I assumed credibility up until that sentence. This statement alone shows the misunderstanding of what's going on. About 1/8 of our country has none of these "choices"...they can't get surgery, don't have access to any doctor, quality isn't a concern when quantity is non-existent, and choosing a doctor doesn't matter when you can't have any....I myself, a law student, son of a cop and teacher, don't have health insurance because I can't afford it.
And as far as our healthcare "preeminence"...that's a joke right?
I hardly feel sad for these companies if that was the intention of your article.
I used to work for one of these companies and they are careless, heartless people. They are less interested in the good of all then they are in making deep deep profits.
There were many studies that were questionable at best and still they pushed to get things to market faster and faster to make bigger and bigger profits.
I couldn't work for them anymore as I could truely feel my soul slipping away every day.
I say hang 'em high and strip them of their political power.
Not to worry...40 million people are going to get $1000 checks from President Obama who is going to put gas in their car and pay their mortgages. (I can't believe we have to fight the same battle over and over and over...)
tob1303 where do you get your credibility from? We are the preeminent nation for healthcare. Quality-wise you can't really argue that or why do so many people come here from around the world for major, life-saving treatments and procedures? And the author's statements about less choice and less quality echoes a common complaint that I have hear from Canadian expats in the US. My father works for a Canadian company and I played hockey for 15 years, so I know a rather large sample of Canadians. And while they are grateful for their universal healthcare system, they nearly unanimously claim to receive higher quality care and better diversity of coverage here in the States.
To clarify: I don't know a large sample of Canadians, I know a relatively large number compared to the average US citizen/resident.
Our healthcare system costs 16% of GDP; the average for OECD nations is 8% of GDP. We are the only industrialized nation that doesn't cover everyone. The Swiss have more choice than we do and pay half as much.
That extra 8% difference goes somewhere--to insurance firms and pharmaceutical companies; and to wasted paperwork. Big Pharma has turned itself into quarry.
You can't blame the next administration and the next round of punditry for targeting them when they painted the bullseye on themselves.
The rather heated back-and-forth here misses the author's point, no? Dezenhall suggests that for reasons of political convenience and a sort of psychic need, the Pharma industry is headed for the Democrats' dock. Why don't we discuss that?
Rather than detail this or that anonymous view ("I know these people and don't like their focus on making profit") we need to confront the political reality that certain private industries are being targeted by certain public officials for reasons that seem awfully ideological. I would suggest that's a lot more serious than whether Amgen made a lot of money seven years ago.
Strangely missing from this article is Pharma's involvement in the Medicare Drug deal wherein they gained huge profits allowing no negotiation of drug costs.
This article strikes me as the first public scare tatic to get the public on their side. Sorry, not buying your BS.
The FDA under the current adminstration has speeded up getting drugs onto the market and how many recalls have we had? I don't buy a pill these days unless I can get it over the counter. If I need an antibiotic, I want one that's been on the market for years...no new stuff thank you very much. In Mexico you can buy ampicillin over the counter for $9/48.
There are scores of things that can be done to make health care more effective, cost less, and provide health care for all and still have reasonable profits. And no one has suggested that you won't be able to choose your own provider.
But, to do that State Health Care Regulatory Agencies would have to start by cleaning house of really bad providers, including those that steal from the system. Three reasons stop that from being done now - the good ole boy system, lousy laws and resources.
Estimates are that between $30-80 billion per year is stolen from Medicare alone. Imagine what it is in private health care?That would go a long, long way in reducing premiums so people really could afford health care.
Who the hell is Eric Denzenhall? What a pig this guy is.
This is the most repulsive and flagrantly dishonest bit of business I've read in months.....Really surprised its posted on the Beast.
"Justifying blockbuster pharma revenues on the grounds that companies need big money for research and development, while largely true..." This is not largely true. The American drug industry spends huge amount of money on marketing. Read "The Truth About the Drug Companies" by Dr. Angell, a former editor of the respected New England Journal of Medicine. Big pharm is now primarily a marketing machine. It uses its wealth and power to influence Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, as well as the medical profession. Most innovation comes from federally funding science, while big pharm concentrates on "me too" drug. Small tweaks (Prilosec to the purple pill) are done to gain or keep market share, without any real innovation.
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.