Letter to the editor: Cost of covid treatment evidence of drug companies' gouging

A few months ago, a friend of mine contracted covid. Soon after, her medical insurance company issued a statement stating they had paid the drug company $1,453.55 for the Paxlovid treatment. The high cost of the antiviral was a little concerning, and I decided to do some research into the situation. Here are my findings.

The National Institutes of Health received billions of dollars to fund the research and development of treatments for covid. Those dollars came from taxes paid by you, the American taxpayer.

The drug company’s production cost is $13.38. The cost to you, the consumer, is $1,390 to $1,455, a 100-times mark-up.

How did the drug industry use those massive profits? The large drug company CEOs’ compensation is in the tens of millions of dollars yearly. The drug industry further enriches the CEOs and shareholders by spending billions on stock buybacks. The industry spends more on stock buybacks than on research and development.

The industry also spends billions of dollars in advertising and billions of dollars on lobbying. The pharmaceutical companies use their excess profits from price gouging us to legally bribe our lawmakers to work for them instead of us, their constituents.

It is time for us to demand a change.

Gloria Gralewski

Manor