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Letter: Pharmaceutical costs don’t add up

By Michael Ansbro, Vancouver
Published: March 2, 2017, 6:00am

The Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010 and upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2012. GOP members of Congress insist it must be repealed because it’s driving up the cost of health care. Curiously, during the years 2012 through 2015 Big Pharma companies spent a total of $16.3 billion advertising prescription drugs, according to The Harvard Medical School (Harvard Health Watch, 2017).

In our “free market” economy promoted by Wall Streeters, such expenditures demand a healthy return and apparently get them with drugs. The amount of $3.2 billion spent on advertising in 2012 quickly increased to $5.2 billion in 2015.

Small wonder Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler prefers telephone town hall meetings where she can use talking points to explain the high cost of Obamacare. Math of this kind would be hard to rationalize in person.

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