Rising Cost of Prescription Drugs Case 4 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Rising Cost of Prescription Drugs Case 4 - Essay Example One of the main problems for the rising costs in prescription drugs is the pharmaceutical companies. According to pharmaceutical companies, the reason why the costs of prescription drugs are rising is due to the research cost in testing new medicines that will potentially cure various ailments in patients. The drug companies use the revenue from the current prescription drug sales to pay for the research costs of testing new drugs. The new drugs that are tested are eventually marketed to the general public, but because these drugs are new and do not have a generic brand, they are much higher. The drug companies argue that this cycle of pricing drugs at much higher costs is a necessity, since revenue has to be generated to pay for future research. In addition, pharmaceutical companies have to patent new drugs to protect them from any unauthorized sales of new drugs. Patenting requires additional money to retain a lawyer to file the proper documents for patenting the new drugs. As a so lution, the federal government provides a prescription drug coverage plan for Medicare beneficiaries. Currently, the drug companies are not finding better solutions to reduce the rise in prescription medications. These drug companies rely on the revenue from the previous prescription drug sales to pay for the research, testing, and implementation of new drugs. The pharmaceutical companies are blaming the rise in prescription drugs on the increased utilization and demand for various prescription drugs, types of prescriptions that doctors are prescribing to patients, price increases, research and development, and advertising and marketing expenses. In addition, patent protection has caused prescription drugs to increase. The patent laws protect the manufacturers by providing them with an exclusive right to sell the drug products for up to twenty years. After the patent protection expires, the previous patented drugs can be manufactured and