JustCare

Tag: Research

  • How much profit should shareholders reap from health care?

    How much profit should shareholders reap from health care?

    A group of Yale researchers looked at where all the profits from the health care industrial complex flow. They found that the vast majority of money earned by pharmaceutical corporations, for-profit hospitals, health insurers and other publicly traded companies went to corporate shareholders, reports Sujata Srinavasan for Connecticut Public Radio.

    In the 21 years between 2001 and 2022, the researchers found that $2.6 trillion went to shareholders. Their study is published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The number is shocking for at least three reasons. First, the $2.6 trillion represents 95 percent of the profits. Second, only five percent of the money went to medical research and development, improved hospitals or pharmaceutical research. Third, the returns to shareholders more than tripled over that period.

    Given how much Americans pay for health care and the burden of medical debt on millions of us, it’s time for the government to rein in the prices we are being charged or, at the very least, limit corporate profits with the goal of lowering costs. Today, about 12 percent of adults in the US owe more than $10,000 in medical debt. Should there be a limit on corporate profits to reduce health care costs?

    With increasing vertical integration in health care, e.g. UnitedHealth owning providers, a pharmacy benefit manager, claims processing centers, insurance companies and more, unless there is a limit on corporate profits, it’s more than likely that health care costs will continue to mount. Health care corporations are not putting patients first.

    Corporate shareholder returns are not the only funds being stripped out of our health care system and driving up costs. The researchers did not look at the $1 trillion that private equity firms invested in health care over the last decade. These companies have destabilized a large number of hospitals, taking out profits and leaving them in major debt. They have also profited wildly from investments in home care agencies at the expense of older adults.

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  • Pharma spends more on stock buybacks than research

    Pharma spends more on stock buybacks than research

    A new House Oversight Committee report finds that the biggest pharmaceutical companies spend more on stock buybacks than on research. They have spent more each year for the last five years. Lowering drug prices will have little bearing on Pharma’s research, which tends to focus on new versions of drugs that generate high profits and keeping generics and biosimilars off the market.

    House staff analyzed financial data and business practices of the 14 largest drug companies. They assessed how much these pharmaceutical companies spend on executive salaries and stock buybacks, as well as how much they spend on research. They find that not only is more money spent enriching pharmaceutical company executives and investors than on research, but that regulating prescription drug prices should not affect the innovation we need.

    Pharmaceutical companies drive up drug prices in the United States, where they can do so easily, and reduce their drug prices in other countries. Because Congress forbids Medicare from negotiating drug prices, it is easy for pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices. Not surprisingly, Medicare would save close to $500 billion over ten years if it paid prices in line with other wealthy nations.

    Even with drug prices in the US at the same level as other wealthy countries, pharmaceutical companies could invest more in innovation than they do today and still make a handsome profit. They would simply need to spend less on stock buybacks and dividends.

    Pharmaceutical companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. The 14 companies analyzed spent $577 billion between 2016 and 2020. Their investment in research was $21 billion less than that during the same period. Amgen spent six times more on buybacks, dividends and executive pay than on research in 2018.

    Total compensation for the 14 company CEOs for the four years was $3.2 billion. That works out to each pharmaceutical company CEO earning over $57 million a year, on average.

    Several pharmaceutical companies that invested in research, invested in ways to keep generics and biosimilars from entering the market and competing with their brand-name drugs. That’s the kind of research that leads to higher drug prices not to breakthroughs.

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  • What can we learn from the ways dogs age?

    What can we learn from the ways dogs age?

    James Gorman writes for The New York Times about what we can learn from the ways dogs age. Scientists are looking at how dogs age as a way to better understand how we age and to help us improve the way we age. Yes, there are similarities!

    The similarities between the aging process for dogs and human beings appear from the get-go. Dogs act differently as adolescents than they do as newborns or elders. As “teenagers,” they are harder to train and less willing to respond to a command.

    A dog’s DNA also changes as it ages. The process, methylation, does not change a dog’s genes, but it does change the level of gene activity, as is the case with people. Studying the DNA of dogs to see why some live a long life could help us understand why some of us live longer than others.

    Dogs’ personalities also change over time, according to a study of labrador retrievers, published in Nature. Much like us, they tend to mellow in their dotage. They move around less. They are less anxious. And, they tend to be easier to get along with.

    Perhaps most interesting, some dogs–in this case, Border collies were studied–are mature from a young age, much like some young people. These mature dogs don’t tend to experience as significant personality changes as they grow older, just like human beings who are mature from an early age.

    Like us, dogs experience greater pain as they age and develop chronic conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and hypothyroidism. And, they often gain weight when they are older.

    Researchers like studying the aging process in dogs because their life span is far shorter than ours. It is easier and faster to research a dog’s life cycle than our own!

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