From Reuters:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has struck a deal with pharmaceutical companies under which they would pay the agency fees for vetting their TV advertisements in exchange for speedier reviews… The FDA is expected to get more than $300 million in user fees in fiscal 2007, the last year of the current arrangement. The figure would increase by about one-third in fiscal 2008 under the proposed agreement…
Let us break this down for you:
The FDA is charging Big Pharma more to approve TV commercials faster, so drug companies can put more ads on TV faster.
Big Pharma will then pass these costs — as well as the costs of the additional commercials they will presumably now be able to broadcast — on to you, the consumer.
Can a broken system get more broken?
Big pharma also pays perhaps a million dollars on top of PDUFA to accelerate the review process further.
In addition, one purchasing prescripton drugs pays twice for them. How? Because thier taxes, which fund the NIH, pay for much of the research that created this med they bought, whic is met with the audacity of big pharma to charge so much for thier meds.