Over-The-Counter Remedies That ... - Health Nutrition and Fitness

Earlier this month, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced that it may ask the Food and Drug Administration to allow it to market the cholesterol-lowering statin Lipitor over the counter after its patent expires in November.

The FDA has not yet signaled whether it would approve Pfizer?s proposal. And some doctors have reacted coolly to the possibility of an OTC version of Lipitor.

But the development offers regulators ? and the public ? the chance to reconsider how patients access important medications. If done wisely, making more drugs available over the counter can generate significant savings for both consumers and the overall health care system.

Pharmaceutical companies face significant challenges in the immediate future. Patents for seven of the world?s top-selling brand-name drugs ? including the top two, Lipitor and Plavix ? are set to expire over the next 14 months.

About 4.3 million Americans take Lipitor. Each year, Pfizer takes in nearly $11 billion on sales of the drug. After the patent expires, those revenues will dwindle virtually overnight, as generic competitors enter the marketplace.

Consumers, of course, benefit from generic competition by paying lower prices. But the high prices of many patent-protected drugs generate the revenues needed to underwrite the massive research and development expenses that the inventors of brand-name drugs incur.

Bringing a single drug to market costs about $1.3 billion. For every drug that makes it to market, as many as 10,000 compounds fail. That?s why pharmaceutical firms invest more in RD than any other industry ? over $105,000 per sector employee as compared to an average of $10,000 across all U.S. manufacturing companies.?According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, U.S. drug companies invest about 17 percent of their sales in RD.

The looming patent expirations ? combined with those massive drug-development expenses ? is causing many pharmaceutical firms to shed jobs. Merck recently announced that it would eliminate 13,000 jobs by 2015. This year, the pharmaceutical sector as a whole has slashed 5,000 jobs ? on top of 54,000 in 2010 and 61,000 in 2009.

Those are substantial numbers. In 2009, the industry directly employed more than 674,000 U.S. workers. It supported an additional 3.4 million jobs indirectly. With patents expiring and ObamaCare set to assess millions of dollars in new taxes on drug firms, the sector could shrink even further. That would be bad news not just for workers but for all levels of government, as the industry pays about $85 billion annually in local, state, and federal taxes.

Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/over-counter-remedies-reduce-health-care-costs-163318663.html

Source: http://health-nutrition-fitness.net/medical-and-health-news/over-the-counter-remedies-that-would-reduce-health-care-costs/

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