Health Advertising
Introduction
Direct to consumer marketing for healthcare products is a controversial subject because of the fact that it brings together two very different worlds—the free market capitalist world and the health care world—and the end result can be a hodge-podge of confusion in which the best interests of the patient are not always front and center. In a free-market capitalist society, producers want to market their products so that they will sell and yield the producer a nice profit. In the health care industry, there is a need to place greater emphasis on prevention rather than treatment (Lichtenfeld, 2011) and even the Affordable Care Act in the U.S. was designed to promote preventive care by putting people before profits (Obama, 2016). However, the problem of direct to consumer marketing for healthcare products distorts the image of the healthcare industry and makes it unclear as to whether the industry is really out to serve the best interests of patients or if it is rather out to maximize profits. This paper will examine the study by Arnold and Oakley (2013) to understand what the issues are how the pharmaceutical industry’s principles for ethical direct-to-consumer advertising actually serve as a deceptive blocking strategy that keeps regulators at bay.
Ethics of Direct to Consumer Advertising for Healthcare Products
As Arnold and Oakley (2013) note, “companies in the health care industry enhance or harm the well-being of nearly all citizens in industrialized nations” (p. 505). In other words, they can go either way—either towards the betterment of the population or towards the detriment of the population. The main factor that will determine which way companies will go is the ethical factor. Are health care companies operating ethically? If so, they will invariably put the needs of the population before the ever-expanding profit-seeking goals of corporate management.
The problem that Arnold and Oakley (2013) point out is that healthcare companies in the U.S. tend to continuously violate ethical norms and standards, even constructing their own industry standards as a way of combating regulatory ethical frameworks, in order to advertise their products directly to consumers in ways...
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