Ever since the Republican’s have had control over the House and Senate, as well as the White House, Big Pharma has received a lot of benefits, which in my opinion have been undeserved and unwarranted. The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 was a gift to the industry to the tune of more than $8 billion dollars of additional profit according to the January 13, 2007 issue of The Lancet . Since the top ten harmaceutical companies half-year profits in 2006 were a staggering $38 billion, this seems utterly ridiculous.

This opinion piece is not meant to bash a political party. Lord knows they both deserve bashing. What I do have a gripe with is how the Republicans have unabashedly pandered themselves to Big Pharma’s deep pockets. That party received more than 2/3rd’s of the industry’s campaign contributions annually. They spent more than $800 million lobbying Congress and the rest of the Federal government agencies since 1998.

Well, you might ask, they have been creating a bunch of life saving drugs with all the research they’ve been doing, right? Poppycock I say. According to the General Accounting Office, their R & D spending went up by 147% from 1993 to 2004 but new-drug applications only went up 38% in that time frame. Not only that, but the number has been dropping since 1996. If you call Viagra, Cialis and Levitra life saving drugs, well maybe I’m wrong.

In reality, in 2007, there are relatively few new drugs in the pipeline. the industry is in legal battles because of their patent dishonesty when it came to potential side-effects of their drugs (Vioxx, Zypreza to name a few).

The Democrats have already begun the introduction of bills requiring Medicare drug price negotiation, something the Republican backed bill of 2003 forbade. Other bills such as increasing the availability of generics, importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and improved after approval monitoring of existing drugs seem to be on their way. While my faith in politicians is similar to my faith in dinosaurs suddenly appearing at my two young daughter’s elementary school, I do hope a change of climate in Washington D.C. will begin to pull back bad policy decisions made over the past 13 years.