" In 2002, the average price of the fifty drugs most used by senior citizens was approximately $1,500 for a year's supply, and although this refers to what the companies call the average wholesale prices, but is also roughly close to what an individual without insurance pays at the pharmacy.
The increase in research dollars and in GNP share contributed to the business cycle expansion as pharmaceutical firms increased their research and development and brought new drugs to market," says Michael Hood. For over two decades, the pharmaceutical industry has been by far the most profitable in the United States, but not particularly innovative, considering that only a few truly important drugs have been brought to market in recent years, and they were mostly based on taxpayer-funded research at academic institutions, small biotechnology companies or the National Institutes of Health. Moreover, the great majority of "new" drugs are actually just variations of older drugs that are already on the market. In fact, during the last twenty years or so, the pharmaceutical industry has moved from its original purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs and is now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit. From 1960 to 1980, prescription drug sales were fairly static as a percent of U.S. gross domestic product, however from 1980 to 2000, they tripled, and today they stand at more than $200 billion a year. IMS Health estimated total worldwide sales for prescription drugs to be approximately $400 billion in 2002, and roughly half were in the United States.
Growth in the pharmaceutical sector shows pharmaceutical employment expanding at a greater rate than the economy, and according to a U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics report, between 1998 and 2008 jobs in the drug manufacturing industry, which does not include biotech research laboratories, will increase by some 11%, making it one of the fastest-growing manufacturing industries. Moreover, the report claims that "faster than average growth is expected for professional specialty occupations, especially the biological and medical scientists engaged in research and development, the backbone of the drug industry, and computer systems analysts, engineers, and scientists." The BLS report also revealed that nearly half, or some 46.4% of the workforce in drug manufacturing is employed by a few extremely large, meaning 25,000 or more employees, pharmaceutical companies.
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