Author Archives: Richard Meyer

About Richard Meyer

Passionate, award-winning Marketing and Media Executive with an MBA and 15+ years success implementing cutting-edge strategies. Career highlights include driving development/launch of a groundbreaking e-Marketing branding initiative for Eli Lilly product Cialis that led to Website becoming #1 online pharma destination (and #1 in prescription conversions), increasing leads 30% and ROI 38% for $1B manufacturer Medtronic

It’s hard, I mean really hard, to defend big pharma

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  • Big Pharma is evading culpability for the crisis of rising prescription drug prices by point the finger at others, namely pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).
  • Many drugs receive no rebates at all, including 89 percent of Medicare Part D prescriptions. For new drugs, where the price tag can run into the hundreds of thousands a year, rebates are rarely offered because there is no direct competition in the space.
  • Putting profits before people is what big Pharma does. Brand name drug makers have hiked the prices of their products at 10 times the rate of inflation over the last five years. 
  • Drugmakers historically have blamed higher prices on the costs of research and development but didn’t use and of the $7 billion tax benefit to increase R&D.
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Pharma steps in it as blame game continues

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  • Pharmacy benefit managers said rebates paid by drug companies to PBMs, sometimes called “middlemen,” are “not secret or hidden payments” 
  • Executives blamed high drug prices on the drugmakers and their pursuit of profits. 
  • U.S. Healthcare Spending Reaches $420M Per Hour, On Track to Hit $12 Trillion by 2040.
  • 62 health care CEOs made a combined $1.1 billion in 2018 when calculating the actual value of cashed-out stock.
  • In the meantime Republicans are warning drug companies not to cooperate with probes into drug pricing.
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Healthcare cost crisis ignores prevention as a ke​y driver

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  • The United States currently spends more than $420 million per hour on healthcare, a number that is increasing by the minute and is expected to top $12 trillion in 2040, according to HealthCostCrisis.org
  • The U.S. currently spends about twice as much as what other high-income nations do on healthcare — more than $3.6 trillion in 2018, according to the latest estimates from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
  • Despite the higher spending, the U.S. consistently ranks near the bottom on major health indices such as life expectancy and infant mortality.
  • Health spending per person is growing  2X faster than household income driving more than 57 million Americans to cut back household spending to pay for healthcare or medicine.
  • The focus on healthcare spending continues to be cost but very little is said about prevention.
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Pharma late again

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KEY TAKEAWAYS:

  • The rate at which companies have been creating positions for a chief digital officer, or CDO, has slowed to a trickle
  • Just 54 companies, or 2.2%, had created a new CDO position in 2018.
  • It’s because, these days, that job is the responsibility of the entire organization.
  • Pharma companies continue to view digital as a “tactic” rather than integrate digital into the whole organization.
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There’s little evidence that mHealth apps are effective

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  • Out of the hundreds of thousands of mHealth apps on the market, the effectiveness of only 22 has been evaluated in the last decade, per a study published in Nature.
  •  mHealth platforms could cause more harm than good to providers and payers that choose to use them to improve consumer health.
  •  JMIR published a meta-analysis revealing that while fitness apps modestly increased physical activity, the average step count between app users and nonusers was nonsignificant.
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