The $800 Million Pill; The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. [6], 297, [1] pages. Minor ding to several pages top edge. DJ has minor wear. Includes Introduction, Notes, Bibliography, Acknowledgments, and Index, as well as chapters on Biohype; Directed Research; and Big Pharma. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads: Dave, For when you did into this policy arena. Best wishes, Merrill Goozner. Merrill Goozner, is an American journalist, author and educator. He served as editor of Modern Healthcare and ModernHealthcare, a weekly news magazine and daily news website covering the healthcare industry, from December 2012 to April 2017. Since then, he writes a weekly column for the magazine as well as writes and edits GoozNews, an online newsletter. His prior career included five years as a printer with the Cincinnati Post; five years as Cincinnati director of the Ohio Public Interest Campaign (and writer/editor of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Chronicle); a year as reporter for the Hammond (Ind.) Times; four years with Crain's Chicago Business; 13 years with the Chicago Tribune, including four years as Tokyo bureau chief and Chief Asia Correspondent (1991-95) and two years as Chief Economics Correspondent (1998-2000). He subsequently became a professor of business journalism at New York University (2000-2003) and director of the Integrity in Science Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (2004-2009). The $800 Million Pill suggests ways that the government's role in testing new medicines could be expanded to eliminate the private-sector waste driving up the cost of existing drugs. Pharmaceutical firms should be compelled to refocus their human and financial resources on true medical innovation, Goozner insists. This book is essential reading for everyone concerned about the politically charged topics of drug pricing, Medicare coverage, national health care, and the role of pharmaceutical companies in developing countries. Why do lifesaving prescription drugs cost so much? Drug companies insist that prices reflect the millions they invest in research and development. In this gripping exposé, Merrill Goozner contends that American taxpayers are in fact footing the bill twice: once by supporting government-funded research and again by paying astronomically high prices for prescription drugs. Goozner demonstrates that almost all the important new drugs of the past quarter-century actually originated from research at taxpayer-funded universities and at the National Institutes of Health. He reports that once the innovative work is over, the pharmaceutical industry often steps in to reap the profit. Goozner shows how drug innovation is driven by dedicated scientists intent on finding cures for diseases, not by pharmaceutical firms whose bottom line often takes precedence over the advance of medicine. A university biochemist who spent twenty years searching for a single blood protein that later became the best-selling biotech drug in the world, a government employee who discovered the causes for dozens of crippling genetic disorders, and the Department of Energy-funded research that made the Human Genome Project possible--these engrossing accounts illustrate how medical breakthroughs actually take place.