Abstract
Pharmaceutical companies spend huge sums promoting their products whereas regulation of promotional activities is typically underfinanced. Any option for financing the monitoring and regulation of promotion should adhere to three basic principles: stability, predictability and lack of (perverse) ties between the level of financing and performance. This paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of six different models. All these six models considered here have positive and negative features and none may necessarily be ideal in any particular country. Different countries may choose to utilize a combination of two or more of these models in order to raise sufficient revenue. Financing of regulation of drug promotion should more than pay for itself through the prevention of unnecessary drug costs and the avoidance of adverse health effects due to inappropriate prescribing. However, it involves an initial outlay of money that is currently not being spent and many national governments, in both rich and poor countries, are unwilling to incur extra costs.
Highlights
Pharmaceutical companies spend vast sums promoting their products
Summary All the six models considered here have positive and negative features and none may necessarily be ideal in any particular country
Different countries may choose to combine two or more of these models depending on their unique environments and laws
Summary
Pharmaceutical companies spend vast sums promoting their products. Promotion to doctors has been extensively studied and all forms – receiving information that originates with drug companies, using samples, taking gifts – is almost never associated with better prescribing [3,4,5]. Direct-toconsumer advertising (DTCA) is costly and drives up spending on medications; the 50 drugs that were the subject of DTCA accounted for almost as much of the increase in US spending on pharmaceuticals as the 10,000 that were not advertised directly to the public [7]. DTCA has never been reliably shown to improve compliance, lead to more appropriate early diagnosis of under-treated conditions, or prevent hospitalizations and serious disease consequences [8]. There is indirect evidence that DTCA leads to negative health outcomes.
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