sykho

Thanks for the link. This is the first time I’ve heard about this film. The trailer and reading about the film are sad and depressing. I’ll try to watch the film.

My impression is that China is making huge investments in cleaning up the country. Increasingly China has begun to assert itself and not allowing itself to be a dumping ground goes along with this change.

It appears you are correct. Direct to consumer advertising is heavily regulated but not outright banned. In Germany in 2017 the advertising expenditure was around 1.6 billion euros. In 2017 advertising expenditures in the U.S. were 24 billion dollars. There appears to be a big disparity in advertising amounts in the EU vs. the U.S. Germany’s population is more than 1/5 the population of the U.S. and spends far less than 1/5 of the U.S. advertising budget.

From [1] it appears that U.S. sales for pharmaceuticals are double the figure for the EU. This suggests that advertising, lack of regulatory controls on pricing, and R&D account for this. Since medical costs are exspensive in the U.S. at the point of contact and the U.S. spends twice per capita GDP on healthcare people are indignant at the system and things like direct to consumer advertising is an easy target for our ire.

I don’t know if English is your native language but “marketing spend” is correct and “marketing spending” is not.

[1] https://www.efpia.eu/media/361960/efpia-pharmafigures2018_v0...

In European countries the marketing spend is essentially zero for all companies since they are banned from advertising. As you say, marketing clearly does increase profits for the pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. However, from a societal point of view it seems to me that it is much better for society for there to be no marketing of drugs. My wife is a physician and listening to her and her colleagues they all hate drug company TV commercials.

The current system seems to incentivize companies to hold on to patents by making minor, insignificant changes to drugs to maximize profits. They are incentivized to ignored exotic diseases that have too small of a market share for each individual disease but affect, collectively, a lot of people. There is also the fact that in a system like the U.S. where people have large out of pocket expenses at the point of contact with the health care system having companies maximize profits for a particular life saving drug causes some people to view said maximization with disgust.