Pharmaceutical Drug Pricing and Ethics: Identification of the Problem and the Exploration of Solutions

The pharmaceutical industry is facing many key issues today that have a huge impact on millions of people worldwide. The most prominent issue being debated, and that which is the focus of my paper, is the problem of high pharmaceutical drug pricing. This paper first establishes the existence of this problem of high drug prices by presenting evidence such as the marked increase in American health expenditure as a percentage of GDP (Figure 1) and the increase in pharmaceutical spending as a percentage of total health spending (Figure 2). The paper then proceeds to describe the complications this problem presents to the global community. These complications include, but are not limited to, problems resulting from people who are just not capable of paying the steep prices for prescription drugs. These people often resort to trading off their medication for food, apartment rent, or clothes. Other people are capable of buying some prescription drugs, but do not take them as often as they should because of the financial burden this high cost has on their life. Finally, the paper explores several solutions to the problem, and explains the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed solutions. Such proposed solutions include the weakening of patent protection, drug importation from neighboring countries, pharmaceutical price discrimination, the MEND Act