Every day all across the world people die of disease and sickness. Things like heart disease, cancer, HIV and even parasites claim the lives of people everywhere. This phenomenon has been going on since the beginning of time, but in the last few centuries millions of people who would’ve died have been saved by modern medicine. In today’s day and age there seems to be a cure for almost any illness, the problem is how much these cures cost. In recent years pharmaceutical companies have made medicine harder and harder to get by developing monopolies, price gouging, and being corrupt any chance they get. This needs to be fixed, I don’t ever lose sleep at night but if I did it would be worrying about the monopolies that pharmaceutical companies have. An example …show more content…
The answer starts with how much money they make. Pharmaceutical corporations are some of the biggest companies in the world and they use their money for things like, political lobbying and paying for studies to show that certain drugs are safe.(Lusher) The most important thing that they spend their money on is the process of getting drugs approved by the FDA. The process of getting a drug approved is very rigorous and costs companies millions of dollars. This makes it hard for smaller companies to compete with the giant corporations but what really helps corporations is the twenty year patent that each newly approved drug gets. This means that if any companies want to create a cheaper or generic version of a drug they have to wait for the twenty year patent to expire. Twenty years is more than enough time for corporation to build up the wealth needed to buy out all of the small companies and maintain their monopolies. All of these factors combine to create situations where pharmaceutical corporations have a monopolies on certain drugs and they can raise the price by however much they