If you took the time to look at the link I posted that talks about the Forbes piece, you'd see that they specifically excluded the cost of marketing from the analysis of how much it costs to put out a new drug. When companies do marketing, they expect it to more than pay for itself, clearly it is, or they wouldn't be spending so much on it. I know people don't like to hear it, but marketing products does lead to more sales.
Trust me, having worked in an R&D organization, there was no want for more funding. There was an incredible level of funding. If the problem in the drug industry is simply that not enough is being spent on R&D, that is easily correctable. Unfortunately for all of us, that's not the problem.
Of course one expects marketing mental diseases to be effective! 'Its not your fault, take a pill and it will all go away' certainly has mass emotional appeal. However, the article is not too convincing about the methodology of excluding marketing expenses.
First - and I know that I'm going to hear about this from some people - you might assume that different companies are putting different things under the banner of R&D for accounting purposes. But there's a limit to how much of that you can do. Remember, there's a separate sales and marketing budget, too, of course, and people never get tired of pointing out that it's even larger than the R&D one. So how inflated can these figures be?
Not particularly powerful evidence here: a vague notion of a limit, and a rhetorical question. Corporate accounting statements are generally only accountable to the board of directors, who might be perfectly happy with pushing the limit on creative accounting while the stock goes up. When aimed at investors other than the board, and especially when used by citizens attempting to assess the social value of institutions, accounting statements are better treated as marketing materials themselves.
We can discuss evidence when the CFOs of these corporations open their daily work to a public VNC session.
"If the problem in the drug industry is simply that not enough is being spent on R&D, that is easily correctable. Unfortunately for all of us, that's not the problem."
The problem with the drug industry is basically that many of their most important epistemological assumptions are largely incorrect. The reason the entire industry is about to go under isn't because all the easy cures have been taken, it's because they started to buy into their own bullshit. Their astronomical R&D costs and terrible success rates are largely their own fault, so I don't really buy this high cost of R&D argument as a reason for not making the drugs more widely available. I won't bother rehashing all of the epistemological problems with allopathic medicine here, but I was link to this video which talks about why the ubiquitous mouse model is so problematic:
Trust me, having worked in an R&D organization, there was no want for more funding. There was an incredible level of funding. If the problem in the drug industry is simply that not enough is being spent on R&D, that is easily correctable. Unfortunately for all of us, that's not the problem.